The relevance of researching the issue of a specific cultural meaning for a word in a folklore text is based on its being insufficiently studied and due to the importance for solving the problem of the folklore language semantic features. Yakut nominations for dairy products, which are the key words in the language of the Sakha people’s folklore, have not been an object of a special study yet. In this regard, this study aims to analyze the symbolic meanings and the semiotic functions of the Yakut food nominations and motivation for their metaphorization in the context of the mythopoetic worldview. The lexical analysis of a word is accompanied in this work with cultural and semiotic excursions into the field of material culture, ritual practices, customs, and so on; in other words, a linguistic sign is regarded in the context of other, non-linguistic, signs. The language semantics, in turn, allows interpreting and presenting seemingly disparate information and bizarre culture components in a single dynamic system. The advantage of the suggested approach is that the analysis of the vocabulary in the background of all the native speakers’ cultural presupposition actualizes the cultural meaning of a word and its referent, potential semes and various connotations, providing a more accurate interpretation of both the word and the text as a whole.

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