ON SEMANTIC TRANSFORMATION OF THE ADJECTIVE FAUL IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

The article studies semantic development of the adjective “faul” in German. The analysis involves data from etymological, monolingual explanatory and phraseological dictionaries of the German language. The article demonstrates the way of transformation of the word from its direct meaning to the indirect one as well as describes phraseological units explicitly or implicitly portraying the conceptual features "to indulge in idleness" and "to be lazy". The results of the study complement the description of axiological, figurative and conceptual components of the concept "labour" and allow us to depict a fragment of the linguistic world-image of German native-speakers.