Semantic field "mental or intellectual activity"in idiolect of medieval translator
Semantic groupings of Church Slavonic and Old Russian lexemes have been a focus of numerous studies mostly based on dictionary materials, which encompass the lexis from different periods and territories. The study of a particular lexical group in the text belonging to one author (or translator) enables us to restore the fragment of the lexical system as it existed at a particular moment in the past. Corpus Areopagiticum Slavicum is a very reliable source of information, as the translation and even one of the manuscripts (Gilf 46) of the Corpus is dated (1371) and attributed to Isaiah of Serres and therefore reflects his idiolect. Moreover, the Corpus itself concerns the questions of cognition and contains commentaries clarifying the meanings of particular Greek (and Slavic in translation) words. The semantic field under consideration («mental or intellectual activity») includes about 500 lexical units (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and is formed by several subfields, such as the «intellectual ability» (the centre of the field), «intellectual activity aimed at cognition», «the result of intellectual activity» etc. In particular such lexemes as um, razum, slava, khudozhestvo, khytrost’, vedeti, and razumeti are considered.