Lexico-semantic group «fantastic birds» as a fragment of the russian language picture of the world

The article describes a fragment of the Russian language picture of the world «Fantastic birds», represented by the lexico-semantic group of the same name, from the point of view of paradigmatics, semantics and linguocultural specificity.
The purpose of this article is to analyze the structural and semantic connections of the typical nominations of fantastic birds included in the lexico-semantic group «Fantastic birds» in the Russian language, and the specifics of the field organization of the lexico-semantic in Russian language.
The component and context analysis of the explication of the semantic composition of the content of the lexemes under consideration in the Russian linguoculture is actual. The analysis of paradigmatic connections and similar changes in the semantic structure of the borrowed and Russian nominations related to the lexico-semantic group “Fantastic Birds”, the meanings of which respectively get or actualize the Russian linguoculture national specifics, is fundamentally new in the article.
The article concludes that the original mythological meaning of the nominations has transformed into the meaning of ‘fantastic bird’, which gradually loses its connection with mythology and acquires characteristic parameters that are significant for Russian speakers, the volume and degree of expression of which is associated with the location of lexemes in the field structure of the lexico-semantic group «Fantastic birds» in the Russian linguoculture.
Based on the contexts of existence of lexeme which were obtained using the sampling method through the National Corps of the Russian language, the author found that the Russian language is characterized by the development on the basis of the studied nominations of proper names, which are homonymous words in relation to these lexemes, the appearance of ethnospecific semes in the meaning structure of the nominations, contamination of the meanings of some words, the formation of the same type of cognitive metaphor based on the direct meaning of the lexemes, reflecting the similarity, contiguity and associative connections between the target area and the source area in the Russian language.
The research materials were obtained during the work with different types of Russian dictionaries (encyclopedic, mythological, ethnolinguistic, etymological, historical, explanatory, dictionaries of foreign words) and the National Corps of the Russian language and cover the period from the 11th to the 21st centuries.

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