THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF LANDSCAPE TERMS IN GERMAN FOLK TEXTS (A CASE STUDY OF FAIRY TALES, PROVERBS AND SAYINGS)

Abstract

German folk landscape lexis, its functioning and text components' influence are studied in the aspect of interaction of some factors, such as a key role of denotative components while conceptualizing landscape's objects and their material characteristics; folk genre's purpose while actualizing its connotative features of social space; the influence of text units (actualizators) and their semantics on 'expansion' of meanings in landscape term structures. Due to the analysis of functional features of these words, two main features of the space have been determined – representation of landscape's objects and their material characteristics (size, length, quantity, material, stuff) and realization of their social features ('safe/unsafe', 'unavailable/available', 'useless/useful', etc.). The dominance of the material component in the semantic structure of landscape terms is noted in the designations of mountainous terrain. The social characteristics are presented with subjective interpretation of individual properties and elements of the relief. The conditions of interaction between the members and the landscape contexts are disclosed in the analysis of phrases in which the social characteristics of the complexes express meanings ('size', 'unavailable', 'safe', etc.). The study shows that folk texts of different genres (fairy tales, proverbs and sayings) is a valuable source of lexical material, as they reflect the stable interactions between connotative components and the semantics of fairy tales texts, proverbs and sayings. Thus, they should be taken into consideration while translating German folk texts to Russian language.

Keywords

• landscape term
• semantics
• semantic word structure
• connotation
• denotation
• folk text.