Description of Personification in the Dictionary as a Problem of Poetic Lexicography

Abstract

The article offers a methodology for the lexicographic description of personification in the 6th volume of the "Materials for the Dictionary of Metaphors and Similes of the 19-21 st Centuries Russian Literature. Human". Personification is considered as constructions of metaphors and similes with the meaning of personalization, that is, comparative tropes with the vehicles belonging to the "Human" semantic category. The methodology is based on ideographic and chronological principles which allow us to summarize the information on the composition of comparative trope system and its development in the course of time. While grouping the material, the authors take into account the semantic relations of units in the language lexical system: "genus–species", "action–actor", "action–instrument", synonymy, antonymy, conversion, derivation, etc. The main source of the dictionary is poetry and prose of the Russian writers of the 19-21 st centuries (about 500 authors). The paper presents the dictionary description methodology on the example of the dictionary entry titled "Death", which serves as a pilot design for testing the ideographic classification of the entire volume. The prop words of tropes personifying death are divided into the following classes: "Units naming persons", "Movement", "Speech", "Actions of death with a person", "Physical states and processes in the body", "Parts of the body", "Emotions and emotional actions", "Attributes of death". The classification is developed on the basis of analyzing 2 500 figurative contexts personifying death taking into account already existing ideographic classifications. The article shows that evolution of semantic classes of vehicles is observed in the direction of increasing diversity of names of actions, functions, properties, characteristics, states, instruments of death.