The functions of the tokens of the thematic group ‘water’ in the lyrics of Mandelstam

The paper describes lexical units related to the hydrological subjects in Mandelstam’s lyrics. The image of water and its perception by the language speakers and culture bearers occupies an important place in the worldviews, and its study in works of art helps to reveal and broaden the author’s outlook. The paper analyzes the main sources of metaphors; the focus is on the analysis of nouns as the main sources of metaphors with images of water. The material for the study included 120 poems written by Mandelstam in different periods of his creative life. From these, by continuous sampling, were selected 318 contexts containing vocabulary that names water, its properties and forms, etc., as well as objects associated with water, such as ships, vessels, marine animals. In the course of the study, thematic subgroups of such vocabulary in Mandelstam’s poetic works were identified and the qualitative functions of the lexical units of these subgroups were analyzed. The functions of lexical units are understood in the paper as indirect meanings that are expressed associatively in the text and help to reveal the multilayering and the deep meaning behind the author’s image. In the course of the work, lexical subgroups of two levels of hierarchy were determined; it is shown that the functions of lexical units are manifested and specified at the second, lower, level. The most active in Mandelstam’s lyrics are lexemes of the thematic subgroups ‘oceans/seas’, ‘ships’, ‘form’, ‘physiological fluids’. The most frequently realized functions of the vocabulary of the thematic group ‘water’ are the expression of the lyrical hero’s feelings, reference to the instability of the world, and the understanding of water as an element, as primordial chaos. These functions are implemented using the vocabulary of different thematic subgroups, but they are united by the subgroup ‘form’, which is important for Mandelstam and shows the opposition between order and chaos. The vocabulary of each thematic subgroup usually performs several functions at once, while at the same time each function can be expressed by vocabulary of several subgroups. Thus, there is formed a network of interrelations of the thematic subgroups and the functions of their lexical units, which characterizes a single system of images related to the vocabulary of the thematic group ‘water’.