Information on the thesis

The thesis is devoted to multi-paradigmal investigation of functional and
semantic field of relogious lexis in British and American English. The research contains
the analysis of modern approaches to religious lexis study (they are conceptual and
semantic studies, semiotic approach, functional and semantic one, lexico-grammatical
one, structural and semantic one, discourse approach, as well) based on which the
topicality of the multi-paradigmal approach was motivated and proved.
The material of the research (words and word combinations) was taken from both
lexicographical sources and texts of different genre to see the present tendencies of the
religious lexis development in English.
The extended methodology of multi-paradigmal analysis and its procedure were
clarified and supplemented with linguo-cultural and the word-formation analyses, as
well, by the author, taking into account the purposes and tasks of the research, on one
hand, and the specifics of the material of the present research, on the other hand. So, the
conducted multi-paradigmal analysis has the following procedure: 1) concept
RELIGION was defined, structurized, analysed and represented as a corresponding
conceptosphere; its specifics was provided; it permited us to highlight the way native
speakers of the English language conceptualize RELIGION in their typical and specific
features 2) the religious lexis was systematized as a functional and semantic field, its
features and structure were defiined and correlated to the model of the conceptosphere
«religion». It permitted to conceptualize representations of the concept RELIGION in
their typical and specific features. As a result, lexical, semantic, functional, structural,
psycholinguistic and linguo-cultural peculiarities of the language units denoting
«religion» were defined and described. Besides, (3) in the course of the analyses the
semantic changes, the semantic processes as well as word-fomation specifics were
deeply investigated in the present research to demonstrate the dynamics of the
development of the religious lexis and its subsystem in the Modern English; lingual and
cultural analyses and psycholinguistic analysis were partially implemented to the
research here, 4) the language units under analyses were classified in accordance with
18 criteria.
The main semantic processes of the religious lexis in English are as follows:
metaphorization, metonimization, desemantization, resemantization, transsemantic and
transfunctional changes, multifunctionalism, etc. They define the modern tendencies of
development the functional and semantic field under analysis. Affixation,
accronimisation, conversion, abbreviation, merger, compounding were found out as the
most productive word-formation processes in the religious lexis.
Key words: functional and semantic field, religious lexis, multy-paradigmal
analysis, semantics, semantic processes, word-formation, the English language