Lexical units representing the opposition ‘cold-warm’ in weather discourse in the modern Russian language

The article examines the words that implement the semantic opposition ‘cold-warm’ in the modern Russian language and reflect a person’s perception of temperature, which depends on many conditions, including geographical location and climate features. The material for this study comprised temperature nominations selected from explanatory dictionaries, synonym and antonym dictionaries. Acting as one of the means of describing the weather, temperature lexemes are an integral part of the vocabulary of the Russian language. We study this group of words from the point of view of their lexical meaning, belonging to the thematic group, typical collocations, as well as the use in texts of various functional styles. We come to a conclusion that the uniqueness of the semantic opposition ‘cold-warm’ related to the discourse of weather, is manifested in many metaphorical expressions reflecting the uniqueness of Russian culture and the peculiarities of the Russian people’s mentality. Most of the words that implement this opposition are antonyms, some of them express opposite meanings in set phrases. Sometimes their original meaning changes when they are part of such phrases. We note that lexical units that implement the semantic opposition ‘cold-warm’ and are used in the modern Russian language in a figurative sense can acquire a symbolic meaning. The article concludes that in the Russian language temperature nouns collocate with adjectives derived from toponyms. In the media texts these lexical units make it possible to express the author’s assessment not only of weather phenomena but also of political events. This article can be used as a basis for further research in this field.