Transferred and Figurative Meanings of Linguistic Units in Adjarian Dialect (According to Dictionary Material)

Abstract

Dialect is the nourishing source of literary language, it is the unrestricted arena where words of a certain meaning are born. It happens over time that the word sometimes changes semantics, it gets the new meanings, including transferred and figurative ones. The Adjarian dialect of Georgian language is not an exception in this way. It nurtures the literary language and complements it with various word forms and expressions.

Numerous important researches have been dedicated to the study of Adjarian dialect vocabulary and quite rich lexicographical base is created. The article discusses, on the one hand, the words that have acquired a transferred meaning in Adjarian, and, on the other hand, the words of figurative meaning, according to the dictionary material (mainly on the basis of Georgian dialect corpus from Sh. Nizharadze “Adjarian dialect (vocabulary) of Georgian language” and other dictionaries). The data of literary language (on the basis of the explanatory dictionary of the Georgian language) and other dialects are taken into account during the analysis of lexical units; The transferred and figurative meanings of the word are singled out at both the nominative and the verbal, as well as the word combination and phrasal levels.

Some lexical units confirmed in the analysis are either not found at all (for example, ‘dedabrikortsila’, which means to kindle a fire with dried spruce conifers, shavings, etc. In this case, the fire has less power, lacks warmth...), or they have no transferred or figurative meaning characteristic to adjarian (for example ‘atsutsunebuli’ (complaining) = in a figurative sense it is a food mixed with a fragrant seasoning, a delicious food...) neither in the dictionary definition of the Georgian language nor in the dialect corpus of the Georgian language. According to this we consider the material analyzed by us to be worth foreseeing for the Georgian dictionary space.