Comparative semantic analysis of posture verbs ‘stand’, ‘sit’, ‘lie’ in Russian, English and Kabardino-Circassian

The proposed article is in line with the problem of encoding space in natural language, which is currently being actively developed against a broad typological background. When studying the issues of linguistic conceptualization of space, as is well known, researchers generally speak of two types of situations: dynamic – the subject moves in space and static – the subject is at rest. This state is expressed by one of the so-called position verbs: sit, stand, lie down, which play a key role in the linguistic representation of a static spatial situation. The present work is devoted to a comparative study of position verbs in the languages involved in the analysis. Hence, the objective of the study is to conduct a brief cross-cultural analysis of the semantics of these verbs based on data from explanatory dictionaries and examples of their use in order to identify ways and principles of their conceptual expansion. At the same time, while these lexemes are described with varying degrees of completeness and from different angles in many languages of the world, including English and Russian, their correlates in Kabardino-Circassian (hereinafter, Kabardian or KL), have been studied and described insufficiently. In particular, the article shows that while Russian and English generally use prepositional structures to encode static localization, Kabardian resorts to some specific means due to its structural features. Being a typical representative of polysynthetic languages, spatial relations here are encoded, par excellence, by means of locative complexes consisting of a verbal prefix with a locative meaning combined with a root morpheme expressing some key ‘at-rest positions’. 

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