Objective semantics of oral utterances in the religious hymns of the Rigveda

The aim of this research is to determine the characteristic features of objective semantics in words denoting oral messages, based on the material of ancient Indian religious hymns. The article presents quantitative results demonstrating the extralinguistic denotations involved in the creation of metaphorized metalexicon – "word," "speech," "voice," "song," "praise," "hymn," "prayer" – and identifies semantic groups of features of corporeal objects: movement and location in space (23.8%), influence by/on the word (21.2%), creation and transformation (18.1%), object (11.3%), animal (10.8%), body of water (6.2%), human (2.5%), birth (2.5%), battle (2%), coitus (0.5%), protection (0.5%). The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the symbolic representation of oral utterances in correlation with objects of extralinguistic reality is investigated for the first time on the archaic material of oral tradition. As a result of the analysis of the Rigveda, it was established that significant objects and phenomena of culture serve as denotations in the poetic formation of the objective semantics of lexemes, and the more important the social, ritual, or directly frequently repeated physical action, the more diverse the means of lexical expression in the language.