Figurative features of concepts WINTER and SUMMER in the Even linguistic culture

The article aims to identify figurative features of the temporal concepts SUMMER and WINTER in the Evens linguistic picture of the world. The study adopted the anthropological approach that involves examining the language in close connection with people’s perception of the world and their relationship with the surrounding 50 https://doi.org/10.22250/24107190202410350 reality. In the linguistic picture of the world, concepts are structured nominative fields including both main means of linguistic expression and less frequent components. The main (dominant) means were chosen as the focus of this paper. Studying the samples of the Even prose, poetry and folklore by means of conceptual and linguocultural analysis enabled to identify five dominant figurative features characterizing the concept SUMMER and six dominant features characterizing the concept WINTER. The ones for SUMMER were vitality features (those connected with life cycles and verbalized by the corresponding verbs), qualitative features (those characterizing qualities by means of epithets that create anthropomorphic metaphors), temperaturerelated features, objectrelated features (clothing items) and zoomorphic features (those connected with animal world exploiting the corresponding metaphors. The same features, except for objectrelated ones, were identified for the concept WINTER. Vitality features were verbalized in the similar way, but the manifestation of the other three features was opposite. Besides the four features similar with the concept SUMMER, two features specific for the concept WINTER were found: characterrelated features (those connected with a person’s character traits) and perceptionrelated features.