Lexical representation of the notion coffee in present-day English (on the material of lexicographical sources)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the lexicon that represents the notion of coffee in present-day English. The novelty of the research is that the corresponding lexical units were established, analysed, and then distributed in groups, with their semantic connections revealed and described. It is quite topical as a great number of modern philology studies focus now on those lexical domains that verbalize various fragments of material and spiritual life of an ethnic community. Thus, in this work, the thematic criterion of stratification of the part of English vocabulary that denotes coffee was applied. The borrowed nature of the lexeme coffee was revealed. The polysemous lexeme possesses a six component structure, the basic lexico-semantic variant of which fixes the connotation. It was established that the other meanings were formed as a result of a metonymic shift. We demonstrated that the unit coffee is a core of the lexicon “coffee” with nine thematic groups, further differentiated into thematic subgroups, lexical-semantic groups and synonymic rows. The stylistic classification of the vocabulary was also carried out. The identified groups reflect the components (or their combination) of the notion of coffee, which was initially modelled on the basis of the study of the meaning of the lexeme coffee and finally expanded in the course of further analysis of the lexical fragment.