LEXICAL EXPLICATION OF THE CONCEPT «POWER» IN OLD ENGLISH (LEXICAL AND-SEMANTIC STUDIES)

Abstract

The paper deals with a group of Old English lexemes with the meaning ʻpowerʼ, namely: wald/weald, mund, rīki/rīce, dōm. The use of wald/weald, mund, rīki/rīce, dōm in genre-variegated original texts gives grounds for referring them to the semantic field «Law», i.e., to a very important cluster of the vocabulary of the ancient Angles and Saxons. Working with words expressing the concept of «power», the authors set the goal of analyzing the semantic nuances that differentiate the use of OE wald, mund, etc., for which they solve several research tasks: 1) find out the sources of the semantics of ʻpowerʼ; 2) determine the conditions in which the sememe ʻpowerʼ developed on the basis of other meanings (contexts and, in one case, possibly the result of the influence of Latin as the language of law). The analysis of the material gives reason to assume that the Old English contexts, where actual connections of the meanings of a single word are traced, do not always prove the fact that the sememe ʻpowerʼ appeared precisely in the Old English period, because in other ancient Germanic languages etymological analogues with a close semantic relationship are known. This fact indicates the probability of the Proto-Germanic age of the semantic shift.