SEMANTIC DERIVATION OF VERBS OF SMELL EMISSION: LEXICO-TYPOLOGICAL ASPECT

Abstract

Semantics modelling is thought to reveal not only the conceptual entities that underlie the contents of a linguistic item or a class of linguistic items but also those areas of language cognition that represent the national worldview, the specificities of ethnic mentality, and the characteristics of cognitive abilities which belong to different linguistic communities. Seen from this perspective, semantic modelling acquires significance for cross-linguistic (either contrastive or typological) studies, as it offers methods to decipher the peculiar manners in which the semantics of a linguistic item encodes and distributes information on a certain situation in both related and non-related languages. Semantic derivation is one of the aspects that reveals the dynamic potential of lexical items, discovers the mechanisms and strategies of lexical items’ extensions, displays the semantic associations that underlie the development of semantic paradigms of lexical items, etc. The article focuses on the semantic derivation of verbs of smell emission in the Germanic (English, German) and Romance (French) languages. Semantic derivation of verbal denominations is supposed to be realized simultaneously with a situation concept extension. The extension of the concept is determined by the changes the participants undergo within the source-to-target-situation transitions (shifts). The development of the semantic paradigm construed by the English, German, and French verbs of smell emission suggests the regular way of the changes, revealing the extension of the source situation concept towards the boundaries of the predicates of the acquired (based on the changes of the participants’ structure and status), concurrent (based on the changes of the participants’ position), and categorial (based on the changes of the participants’ categorial features) states.