Evaluation in the semantics of the lexemes “life” and “death”

The aim of the research is to identify evaluative components in the structure of the lexical meanings of the pair of words “life” – “death”. The work uses a set of methods of linguistic analysis. The scientific novelty of the research lies in analysing evaluative components in the semantic structures of the pair of antonyms “life” – “death”, namely, in describing asymmetry and symmetry in the pragmatic macro-component of the meaning of these words: asymmetry manifests itself in the direction of pragmatic evaluation of the phenomena denoted by the words “life” and “death”, the former is correlated with something very good, goodness, the latter is correlated with something very bad, evil, misfortune; symmetrical linguistic behaviour is manifested in both lexemes in the derived values with the semantics of common evaluation and in the derived values that determine that life and death are the object of regular evaluation. In addition, the paper is the first to demonstrate that a certain ratio of positive and negative semes in the meaning of these lexemes marks the type of discourse (everyday, religious-philosophical, art criticism, artistic). As a result, it has been proved that not only the individual connotations of a word affect the development of its semantic structure, but also the pragmatic components of one lexeme from a pair of antonyms have an impact on the semantic variability of the other. Studying evaluation in the semantics of these units makes it possible to trace the dynamic processes in the semantic structures of the words, as well as common and different features in their linguistic behaviour.