Публикации автора

The article analyzes the lexical-semantic group “fire” in the Old Norse and the modern Norwegian languages. Old Norse is the ancestor language of modern Norwegian, which opens up wide opportunities for comparative analysis of the chosen lexical units’ semantic content. The aim of the study is to compare historical and modern lexical-semantic variants of the selected lexemes. The authors distinguish the following Old Norse lexemes of the lexical-semantic group “fire”: eldr, bál, bruni, brenna, and log (logi); in modern Norwegian those are ild, bål, brann, lue, flamme, bluss, and fyr. The material for the analysis is a text corpus including Icelandic sagas and Norwegian works of fiction and news articles, which serve as a basis for contextual analysis aimed to identify the inherent meanings of the words. The authors conclude that the modern Norwegian language retains a great variety of vocabulary with the basic meaning of “fire”, which also was typical of the Old Norse language. Each of the studied words has a number of lexical-semantic variants, and not all the Norwegian lexemes considered derive their etymology from the Old Norse ones. Moreover, several lexical units in modern Norwegian have acquired a number of additional meanings, which can be explained by historical and technological development of society. The authors note that the group of lexemes under consideration is also characterized by the phenomena of metonymic and metaphorical transfer. Metaphorical transfer is of particular interest, as it is manifested in the description of strong feelings and emotions, both in Old Norse and in modern Norwegian.