STANDARD LANGUAGE PROCESSES: COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MICROSYSTEMS

The works of O.N. Seliverstova on contrastive semantics give an inexhaustible vision of the comparison of languages in their theoretical aspect. Her well-known works on the contrastive study of the prepositional vocabulary in English and Russian languages, significantly supplemented the ideas in linguistics about those concepts that are necessary for comparing a separate lexical microsystem (in her work, spatial prepositions and adverbs). She found that in order to compare the lexical units of the group, it is necessary to take into account at least 14 matching parameters: different ways of isolating the space taken into account in the description, pointing to distance as a condition for the implementation or non-implementation of some action, a description from the angle of either X or Y, the dependence on the description of the type of Y, the significance of the observer concept for describing the semantics of prepositions and adverbs, the separation of individual spaces from the common space, taking into account the concept of “Y area” , belonging of the relyatum Y to a closed set, etc. Since the microsystem of verbal vocabulary is considered in this article as a unit of comparison there was formulated the task of identifying the linguistic processes in the system of verbal vocabulary that underlie the formation of individual verb meanings, the appearance of polysemy. The article presents data on standard language processes that lead to semantic mutations: ؋ change of type of space, elimination of semantics of physical space and actualization of functional relations; ؋ abstraction of the predicate denotate from the time axis, the transition from a specific momentous action to a heterogeneous type of the predicate which is abstracted from the time axis; ؋ focusing on various aspects of the denotative situation, which is the reason for the variability of meaning within one verb meaning, the appearance of additional meanings in one verb, or the naming of the same situation with another synonymous verb; ؋ changes in the nature of relations between actants; ؋ acquisition of new semantics of the verb by getting into a different lexicalsemantic construction (semantic type of the predicate, various kinds of typical semantic-syntactic constructions). Despite the identified “cognitive” reasons for the transition from one meaning to another, it remains a problem why in one language the verb receives the development of meaning along one semantic line, and in another language — on the other.