Attributes coma and kaunis as nominations of a good-looking person

The article examines the nominations of a good-looking person, for which the Karelian language uses a fairly extensive range of lexical means, including the polysemantic attributes kaunis and čoma. The analyzed nomination conventions are widely represented in the language world picture of the Karelian people, especially in idioms. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that this issue has not been previously studied with the use of the Karelian language material. The research methodology included ethnolinguistic and comparative methods, while the theoretical and methodological basis of the study was the studies of foreign and Russian researchers in the fields of linguistics and folklore. The sources for collecting language material were dialect and phraseological dictionaries of the Karelian language, samples of Karelian speech, and field materials collected by the authors. The analysis led to the conclusion that the attributes kaunis and čoma have a wide area of use, with both lexemes being polysemantic. A large number of nominations for a physically attractive person are derived from the lexemes čoma/šoma and kaunis with the help of various suffixes. Moreover, two-component lexemes as parts of the nominative construction with the meaning ‘a good-looking, ruddy-faced person’ are common in Karelian dialects. In Karelian phraseology, the physical attractiveness of a person is presented in different aspects: it has both positive and negative connotations and is compared with various human values.