Contrastive Analysis of the Semantic Paradigms of the British and American Space Nominations

The article provides a contrastive analysis of the semantic paradigms – thematical groups and semantic series of the British and American cultural linguistic space representations. The aim of the article is to select the thematical groups with the highest territorial and functional variativity linked to the problem of developing functional semantics in both compared variants of English. The contrastive analysis of the thematical groups of the British and American nominations of natural spaces reveals the highest development of functional semantics in the names of valleys and water spaces; the highest territorial and functional semantic variativity is observed in the names of artificial spaces, for example, those of communications. Thematical group reducing takes place in the process of space names desemantization, and their increasing is typical of lexico-semantic variants of other thematical groups, borrowings and homonyms, the words of different functional styles of English.