Figurative potential of the word language in Russian poetry: constructions of personification

The main purpose of the work is to explore the metaphorical uses of the word language in poetic contexts in which personification is observed, determine the circle of words - objects of comparison combined with this metaphor, identify the comparative frequency characteristics of these words, trace the chronology of their appearance in the Russian poetic language, analyze the renewal of the traditional metaphor language by poets with the help of other words connected with it by close semantic ties (vernacular, dialect, jargon, names of different languages, etc.). The material for the study is a selection of contexts with the meaning of personification with the word language and words connected with it through synonymy and hypero-hyponymy relations from the Poetic Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. When analyzing the linguistic material, the corpus method, the semantic field method, and the structural-functional method were used. As a result, the study identified semantic classes of objects of comparison characterized by the considered personifier - “The inner world of a person”, “Nature: plants, water, wind, animals, etc.”, “Objects created by people”, as well as the time frames and comparative frequency of their use. Conclusions are drawn about the variation of the traditional metaphor language both at the lexico-semantic and the formal levels. The results of the study represent one of the fragments of the metaphorical system of the Russian poetic language of the XIX-XXI centuries in its development.