The word «fir tree» in texts about New Year and Christmas: funсtional-semantic aspeсt

The article analyzes texts of the print media in order to establish how the words meaning “fir tree” are used in texts about New Year and Christmas. It is ascertained that in texts of newspapers and magazines the topic of Christmas and New Year is mainly represented on the basis of event semantics. However, analysis of large amount of texts showed that words with subject semantics can also play an active role within the topic of the festivals. Moreover, it was established that unlike the word “el” (one of the ways to name a fir tree in Russian), which only presents an abstract concept, the word “jolka” (the other way to name a fir tree) has two more semantic roles: it can act as a word with both subject and event semantics. In this study the words “el’” and “jolka” have the status of key words in traditional meaning: semantic milestones, control points of a text, the words that have semantic content essential for information retrieval purposes. These words structure the text in terms of its meaning, reveal the structure of social events.