THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF THE LEXEME "BEAUTY" IN THE DIACHRONIC ASPECT (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF DICTIONARIES OF THE XVI–XX CENTURIES)

Abstract

The article provides a diachronic analysis of the dictionary defi nitions of the English lexeme ‘beauty'. The lexeme 'beauty' is a vivid example of an abstract name, the meaning of which can be understood and described through reference instances – objects that, according to native speakers, have external features that allow them to be evaluated as "beautiful". The purpose of the study is to show what semantic changes occurred in the semantics of this word, which specifi c objects or phenomena were used as benchmarks to explain its meaning. The research material was the data of explanatory dictionaries of the English language, created from the XVI century to the present. The research uses methods of etymological, historical-linguistic, semantic and defi nitional analysis. The analysis allows us to draw a number of conclusions about the semantics of the lexeme ‘beauty'. The main meaning of the lexeme ‘beauty’ have been formed since the fi rst half of the XIX century. The core of the word ‘beauty’ is the value: the state or quality of being beautiful, it is distinguished by all the dictionaries under study. The representation of the lexeme ‘beauty’ in dictionaries dating back to the XVI–XVII centuries is of the same type and concise in nature. The semantic structure of the ‘beauty’ lexeme shows a tendency to constant complication. If at the initial stages of entering the vocabulary of the English language, the word had 2 meanings, currently the lexeme ‘beauty’ has 8 meanings.