Words describing a person as a basis for nominating the speed of one's activity (through the examples of standard Russian texts)

This article considers the nominations of speed based on the semantic field of «Person»: speed as a category characterizes the human actions in regard to the flow of time, so, in the language, the conception of speed can be represented by the vocabulary describing various aspects of human activity and physical properties of a human being. Three representational motivational groups have been chosen for this article: «The Human as a Physical Body», «The Person Having a Name» and «The Acting Person». The article is written on the material of Russian dialects and the data from literary Russian texts. Analysis of the material allowed us to determine the tendencies of development of figurative sense of the words in the given semantic groups, that is, to single out the models presented mainly in the descriptions of high or low speed. Thus, quick actions are typically nominated by means of the names of body parts as most speed nominations are based on the indication of an intensive use of active body parts. For the negative characteristic of high speed, the vocabulary denoting mental illnesses is used. «Speech» and «food» models, which demonstrate the comparison of work at low speed with waste of time, nearly always become «slow».