Abstract

Referring to certain lexical units of Roget’s Thesaurus, the authors consider in the article philosophical interpretation of verbal means for creation and further transformation of culturally significant senses and meanings that are aligned with death and dying. Thus, the given study involves one of the most famous and historically significant treasuries of language into plentiful and practically oriented philosophical examination. The authors propose a heuristic scheme to classify lexical units according to their structure and meaning with taking general and peripheral meanings into account. The article hermeneutically reveals linguistic and cultural sources of common images and concepts of death and dying. The authors make up a conclusion about sense-generative, gnoseological, world-view, cultural and communicative functions of the above-mentioned units that point to death and dying. Thus, Roget’s Thesaurus can be considered a helpful guide to philosophical examination of culturally prescribed or determined concepts of death and dying, of verbally expressed attitudes to death issues