Прикметники в англійських заповітах 1837 – 2000 років: до питання виокремлення семантичних полів

Abstract

This article is aimed at the systemic description of the body of adjectives used in English Last Wills and Testaments. The corpus of research contains 50 English Last Wills and Testaments written between 1837-2000. The suggested approach to the description is based on the notion of semantic field. Having defined semantic field as a group of words possessing the same conceptual meaning, characterized by certain relations between lexemes and belonging to the same part of speech, the author singles out six semantic fields of adjectives which occur in English Last Wills and Testaments:1) adjective which have a common feature of sequence; 2) adjectives which have a common feature of ownership and describe property and business; 3) adjectives which characterize personality and are used to describe people; 4) adjectives which have a common feature of life boundary; 5) adjectives which have common a feature of legitimacy 6) adjectives which have a common feature of distribution and describe the way of payment. It is substantiated that the relations between the lexical units in each group are based on synonymy in most of the cases. Some subfields are defined by relations of antonymy or are arranged as a circle or sequence.