Epithetation of concept "life" in M. Tsvetaeva’s poetic texts

The significance of the research is related to the development and application of the cognitive-semantic approach to epithetation. The novelty of the research consists of the fact that epithetation is considered as one of the leading mechanisms of metaphor formation in the Tsvetaeva’s idiolect. In this article our purpose is to describe the directions of epithetation of the concept "life" in the M. Tsvetaeva’s poetic texts. For this purpose, it is necessary to explain the following main tasks: to characterize epithetation as a cognitive process, to identify the main directions of epithetation of the concept "life" based on the M. Tsvetaeva’s poetic texts, to determine the specifics of the epithetation of life in her works. This research is based on the combination of cognitive methods of analyzing linguistic facts – cognitivesemantic, blending and lexical-semantic – component, lexicographic; the method of quantitative analysis of linguistic data is also used. The involvement of lexicographic sources, including data from The Russian National Corpus, makes it possible to compare the speech and author's use of attributive words with the concept under consideration, as well as to determine the interrelations of the concept of "life" with semantically close concepts and the antonym "death". The comprehension of concept "life" in the M. Tsvetaeva’s poetic texts is an existential, creative problem; earthly life is understood as imperfect and is contrasted with death, the future life. To fully describe the concept, attributes with the root alive-/life -, which are endowed with objects of the external world, were used. The transience and sinfulness of life provoke the poet to think about suicide, life after death. It is proved that that the specificity of the epithetation of concept "life" is based on the associative similarity of this abstract concept and the human body, natural objects, artifacts. The leading direction of the epithetation of concept "life" is anthropomorphic: life appears in the form of an actor, a subject.