1. THE WORD BRACK AND ITS RELATED MEANINGS IN SOME INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES.
- Author
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Ļaha, Irina
- Subjects
- *
INDO-European languages , *SEMANTICS , *GERMANIC languages , *DUTCH language , *VOCABULARY - Abstract
Different traditions investigate a notion of a concept from various points of view. The representatives of Russian school understands the concept as a cultural unit (Wierzbizka 1980), (Stepanov 2007, 248), and the Western school investigates the concept as a mental unit (Frege 1892), (Fodor 1998). On the basis of a theoretical study of a concept by different schools from Aristotle till recent days the author of the present research has collected some empirical material and investigated a word Brack in selected Germanic languages such as English, German, Danish, and Dutch with examples from Latvian, Russian, and French. A structural approach and comparative method as well as applying elements of synchronic and diachronic analysis are used here revealed all the meanings of the word Brack in the Dutch language (the language of origin, 1510, brak) with the central meaning ''worthless'' in old Dutch and new meanings of the word Brack in modern Dutch. The aim of this research is to compare a semantic field created by the word Brack in the Dutch language with semantic fields of the related words in the analyzed Indo-European languages. The comparative analysis of their meanings in different languages has revealed the idea that a shared component of meaning - "worthless" - is present in all analyzed languages and new additional numerous meanings in investigated languages are related. The database collected consists of 18 meanings of the word Brack within 7 languages, thus the analysis of the related meanings shows close semantic relationships between these words in different Indo-European languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019