CONTEXT AND VERBAL SEMANTICS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the question of the semantic typology of verbs, in particular, the four major classes: action, process, state and attitude. For the interpretation of verbal semantics in the aspect of lexical-semantic classification it is necessary to consider the influence of the context on the meaning of the verb. Available classifications are mainly based on the first meaning of verbal lexeme, but in the minds of speakers often the first association can be second and subsequent, especially portable, meaning.

Purpose: The proposed study analyzes the influence of the subject, circumstantial distributors and the wider context, in particular the subject or predicate of another predicative part on the definition of the semantics of the verb. The actual material was the results of a questionnaire, carried out in two stages: first, respondents had to classify verbal lexemes, then the same verbs, but in the context, by classes of action, state, process, and attitude.

Methods: questionnaires for obtaining factual material by interviewing respondents; descriptive for inventory of the results of questionnaires in order to set the main features of the classification of verbal semantics; contextual analysis to find out the effects of individual elements of the context on the interpretation of the meaning of verbs and statistical analysis to set relationships between individual classes of verbs.

Results. As a result, 3 groups of verbs were found: those that are almost identically distributed in the context and outside of it; those who experienced slight changes in the study between separate classes; those who discovered the greatest “shifts” of semantics in the context. To the first group, respondents enrolled unambiguous verbs and those with a relatively small number of meanings related to each other; to the second – only multivalued verbs with wide properties to metaphorize and different functional load; to the third – multivalued verbs, characterized by a higher level of abstraction. Individual verbs could not be included in any of the groups outside the context (to sow, to reason, to knock, to punct), but in the context these words were distributed. It was dif ficult to classify the verb to reason, which some respondents ranked simultaneously into two classes (action and process outside the context and process and status in the context).

Conclusions. The research allowed us to draw conclusions about the influence of lexical extenders on monosemantic and polysemic verbs, verbs with the property of metaphorization and desemation in the structure of the sentence.