Synchronous-diachronic analysis of the thematic group “Supernatural beings in religious cultures” (on the material of the Russian language)

The study deals with the synchronous-diachronic analysis of the thematic group “Supernatural beings in religious cultures”, formed on the basis of Semantic dictionary edited by N. Y. Shvedova and including lexical units denoting the names of God and the Mother of God; angels and saints; persons with magical abilities performing occult actions; evil forces hostile to man; animal characters in religious cultures. The work examines the structure of the group, the vocabulary representation of the lexemes of the group, as well as the functioning of its units in texts of various periods of the history of the Russian language in different time periods from the 11th century to the present. Russian historical dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, modern explanatory dictionaries of Russian, as well as texts of the Russian National Corpus (Old East Slavic, Church Slavonic, Main Corpus) served as the material for the study. In the course of the research the group was analyzed within the allocated time intervals, and then the results of the synchronous statistics for each of them were compared. Based on the data obtained during the analysis, conclusions were drawn about the state of the thematic group at different stages of the historical development of the Russian language: the first lexicographic records of units at specified time intervals were identified; lexemes that underwent semantic changes over time were noted; lexical units that make up the core of the group, as well as its near-nuclear zone and periphery were singled out. The etymological analysis made it possible to establish ways of forming new words of the thematic group under consideration, as well as to determine the nature of borrowings.