The Semantic Scope of the Adjective Friendly in Modern English

The article aims to study the semantic volume of the adjective friendly and reveal its polysemantic potential in modern English. The research is based on etymological and explanatory dictionaries of the English language, journalistic and literary texts of the late 20th - early 21st centuries presented in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The theoretical analysis of definitions shows that alongside with the meanings of the adjective friendly directly motivated by the derivative word friend, i.e. ‘friendly attitude’ to people in the field of interpersonal relationships, ‘friendly attitude’ to a nation or state in the field of international relations, the lexeme has a number of meanings. They serve to describe objects, phenomena, situations or events in different areas of human social practice: ‘non competitive ’ in sports, ‘belonging to, or in alliance with one’s forces ’ in the military sphere, ‘serviceable/easy to use’ in the technical sphere, ‘favourable’ in the economic sphere, etc. Thus, a metaphorical rethinking of the phenomenon friendship as less complicated and understandable occurs when trying to describe new, more complex, incomprehensible and abstract areas of knowledge and experience. The subsequent contextual analysis is based on ten thousand fragments from journalistic and literary texts by means of the continuous sampling method. The semantic volume of the adjective friendly is determined as a percentage depending on the frequency of use of its meanings for a given number of lexical units. The analysis is based on the idea of the average expert opinion method. The research shows that the most common meaning is closest to the derivative word friend manifesting itself in interpersonal communication. The new areas of knowledge the adjective friendly penetrates due to the occasional metaphorical extension include the legal and medical fields in which new meanings can be seen: ‘agreed’,‘pretrial’, ‘useful’ and ‘additional’. The research observes a new seme in the sociocultural sphere in some special cases, e.g. ‘telegenic’. Thus, the contextual analysis enables to trace the development of the semantics and the increase in the semantic volume of the adjective at the current stage of development of the English language and thereby identify completely new semantic features and new areas of use. To conclude, the research shows a significant expansion of the lexeme friendly, the formation of a new set of semantically derived meanings whose appearance is due to the peculiarities of the human psyche and the process of learning new things in the surrounding reality. In this context, objects, phenomena, and events are described and characterized by the old signifier friendly with new designators, which indicates that the analyzed lexeme is open to semantic neologization.

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