LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC MEANS OF THE MUSIC CONCEPT ACTUALISING IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES

Abstract

The article considers the music realia in the Shakespearean discourse in frames of analysing the interpenetration of the musical art and dramatic heritage of William Shakespeare. Special attention is given to the lexical and semantic means of music concept functioning in Shakespeare’s comedies. A multidisciplinary approach allowed considering the music as an art form, largely correlating with language and having a vast potential to be verbalised in literary texts through nominations, descriptions and predications of the musical realia. In this research, on the basis of general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis and observation, combined with linguistic methods, linguistic terms and concepts adherent to the research topic are defined (analysis of dictionary definitions); the music’s role in culture is determined both in the general historical aspect and in the specific Shakespearean period (linguocultural method); the structure of the lexico-semantic field of the concept “music” is investigated (component analysis); the main categories of the lexico-semantic field of music are revealed (distributive analysis); musical realia verbalisers in William Shakespeare’s comedies are classified (taxonomy method). In frames of the analysis of lexical and semantic means of the music concept functioning, direct and indirect nominations of the musical art form are studied. Based on the illustrative material analysis, the criteria for verbalising indirect categories of musical realia, represented in Shakespearean comedies by name, genre, representative and representation means, are identified. Combined with descriptive and predicative units, direct and indirect nominations of the musical realia, incorporated into William Shakespeare’s comedies, determine the emotional tonality of the lexical units, which is explicated from the context during dramatic texts perception. The analysis of the concept “music” description in Shakespeare’s comedies provided the classification of the main descriptive markers of musical realia. The predicative aspects of the music concept verbalizing in William Shakespeare’s comedies are classified according to the acting of the representative/recipient on the musical realia and the musical realia acting on the representative/recipient.