Nicht nur sauber, sondern rein

Every significant element of native speakers' social experience should be fixed at the language level. The language has a specific structure. It attributes a certain vocabulary to every real-world element reflected in people's mind without duplicating naming units of these or those realia. However, when examining synonyms, one can see an external similarity at the surface level. Such a similarity was detected in the rein and sauber nuclear components during the study of the Clean/Clear/Pure concept at the modern stage of the German language development. Starting out from the assertion that the presence of absolute synonyms is not typical of the language, we ask a question: how does the rein and sauber semantic structures' partial similarity marked in dictionaries (the meaning "without dirt and spots" (about specific and abstract things) at the "surface" semantic level match with the conceptual structure at the "deep" level of the Clean/Clear/Pure concept analysis? In order to give an answer to this question, we have analyzed the semantic structure of each nuclear unit of the Clean/Clear/Pure concept in the modern German language. The research has been drawn upon the examples of an up-to-date diachronic analysis based on an integrated method (O.N. Trubachev's term) of the linguistic unit analysis (it combines various well known linguistic research approaches). The priority has been given to internal (systematic) reconstruction vs. external one. It requires specification of the areal-historical and historical-cultural determination of the linguistic phenomena under study. During the research, we have determined the structure of the lexical-semantic fields at various stages of the history of the German and English languages. The lexical items representing the Clean/Clear/Pure concept at different time levels have been analyzed against the background of semantic relations that characterize genetically close linguistic units (within the same etymological family). The analysis has revealed that context usage occasions and compatibility of the rein and sauber adjectives explain reasons for the functional and semantic similarity of these adjectives: in fact, they do not duplicate each other in similar meanings of the Clean/Clear/Pure concept; they represent various "types of cleanness": the rein lexical item represents purity as an initial, natural property, feature (reiner Wein, Alkohol, Sauerstoff - pure wine, alcohol, oxygen; reines Gold, Wasser - pure, clean gold, water), while sauber means recovered purity as the result of human actions (both physical and mental purification: Die Flusse in Deutsch-land sind sauber, Industrie-Abgase werden gefiltert, Mull wird verbrannt, Umweltprobleme bleiben unsichtbar - Rivers in Germany are clean, exhaust gas is filtered, garbage is burnt, and environmental problems remain unnoticeable; mach dir bitte die Schuhe sauber, bevor du reinkommst - clean your shoes before coming in; ein sauberer Charakter - pure character (which is formed as a result of social interactions and involvement into the public life)).

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