SEMANTICS OF THE CONCEPT “SWEET” IN THE LANGUAGE OF RUSSIAN POETRY (AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE “DICTIONARY OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE 20TH CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY”)

The article analyzes the semantics of “sweet” in the language of Russian poetry. The material of the study is the ongoing multivolume edition “Dictionary of the Language of the 20th Century Russian Poetry” (DLRP), a concordance of a commenting type. The DLRP vocabulary includes the words of all parts of speech found in the sources — the works of ten outstanding poets of the Silver Age: A. Annensky, A. Akhmatova, A. Blok, S. Yesenin, M. Kuzmin, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky, B. Pasternak, V. Khlebnikov, M. Tsvetaeva. The purpose of the work is to identify dictionary entries whose headwords contain an element of meaning “sweet”; to analyze the data of dictionary entries, to study the basic semantic features of the use of lexemes. To achieve these goals, the following tasks are solved in the article: 1. Headwords with the indicated semantics are identified (50 units in total). 2. The features of the functioning of these words in the poetic contexts of the poets of the Silver Age are explained. The statistical characteristics of the words are analyzed separately (the most frequent word is “sweet” 98). The relevance of the study is due to the lack of a description of the semantics of the category of taste in the poetic texts of the Silver Age. The basis of this group is the adjective “tasting sweet”. The article proves that the nominative meaning of the adjective “sweet” is realized only in a small number of cases and is found in the texts of several authors. An important feature of the compatibility of words with “sweet” semantics is the presence of synesthetic contexts: smelltaste, sound-taste (sweet smell of white roses; sweet choirs of Orpheus). This work describes such a semantic phenomenon of the adjective as emotionally expressive enantiosemia. The evaluative element of the value depends on the “embedded” positive or negative component: “positive” - a sweet voice (Kuzmin, 1911-12); “negative” - with sweet bass (Mayakovsky, 1928); “Oh, woe, bitter, sweet life!” “Torn coat, Austrian rifle!” (Block, 1918). In the work, special attention is paid to occasional formations with the root “sweet“. Besides, the stylistic characteristics of words are analyzed. Poetic texts vividly illustrate the features and evolution of the semantic and functional characteristics of a group of words with designated semantics.