Своєрідність формування релігійних значень за допомогою внутрішньослівного гіпонімійного зв’язку

The article is devoted to the study of the specifi cs of the formation of religious meanings with the help of the intraword hyponymic (genus-species) relations. It was revealed t hat in semantic structures of lexemes, this type of semantic derivation is capable of actively deploying stable specialized religious(specifi c, hyponymic) meanings from commonly used (generic, hypernymic) ones. It was also found that in times of Christianization, the fi xation of hyponyms often led to the disappearance of hypernyms. The process of transferring religious hyponyms without hypernyms from other languages into the Old Kyiv language was quite active. Forming a paradigm through hyponymic relations refl ects a variety of changes in the represented reality associated with the linguistically conservative religious sphere of Ukrainians: the names remained unchanged, while language objects, acquiring new functions, changed, and the speakers’ knowledge of the objects deepened.