THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL MEANINGS OF ENGLISH COLOUR LEXIS: DYNAMICS AND MODERN STATE

The article is devoted to the study of the dynamics of development and the current state of linguacultural meanings in colour terms that are used in English-language women's prose. In the course of the analysis of the theoretical and methodological material, it has been revealed that the colour terms in the literary text contribute to the fact that the descriptions and pictures drawn by its author are perceived as correctly as possible by the reader, and the latter more accurately perceives the sensations and emotions experienced by the characters at different moments of the story. During the analysis of the corpus of selected contexts (more than 700 fragments) with colour terms (500 units) from the works of fiction of modern women's prose – criminal literature of the British writer Elizabeth Haynes – a number of features have been established. All the analyzed works are rich in the use of various colours, generally the main ones, and their shades, but there are also other colours. Thematic groups of colour terms include descriptions of the appearance of the main and secondary characters, everyday realia of the surrounding world, phenomena and objects of the natural world, and other abstract notions. Frequently occurring primary colour terms that do not have a transfer of meaning have been distinguished, and less frequent secondary colour terms with a transfer of meaning, and the secondary ones usually had a more complex morphological and syntactic structure. The selected colour terms that describe the appearance of the characters and have a transfer of meaning are divided into two groups, one of which includes colour terms with a metaphorical component, and the other contains colour terms that form transferred epithets. Within the framework of the description of natural phenomena and objects, the authors distinguish fully metaphorized colour terms, partially metaphorized colour terms that include a metaphorized component that does not extend its influence to the other structural elements of the colour term, as well as colour terms represented by an explicit comparison. In general, colour terms fill the work with a deep content, an additional meaning that the author lays down when writing a literary work.