ATTRIBUTES ČOMA AND KAUNIS AS NOMINAIONS OF A GOOD-LOOKING PERSON

The article examines the nominations of a good-looking person, for which the Karelian language uses afairly extensive range of lexical means, including the polysemantic attributes kaunis and čoma. The analyzed nominationconventions are widely represented in the language world picture of the Karelian people, especially in idioms. Therelevance of the study is determined by the fact that this issue has not been previously studied with the use of theKarelian language material. The research methodology included ethnolinguistic and comparative methods, while thetheoretical and methodological basis of the study was the studies of foreign and Russian researchers in the fields oflinguistics and folklore. The sources for collecting language material were dialect and phraseological dictionaries of theKarelian language, samples of Karelian speech, and field materials collected by the authors. The analysis led to theconclusion that the attributes kaunis and čoma have a wide area of use, with both lexemes being polysemantic. A largenumber of nominations for a physically attractive person are derived from the lexemes čoma/šoma and kaunis with thehelp of various suffixes. Moreover, two-component lexemes as parts of the nominative construction with the meaning‘a good-looking, ruddy-faced person’ are common in Karelian dialects. In Karelian phraseology, the physical attractiveness of a person is presented in different aspects: it has both positive and negative connotations and is compared with various human values.