The author supports the thesis that the semantic derivation presents the basic mechanism enriching our lexical resources.

In the recent years the employees of the Research Center for Areal Linguistics at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts have been working on a new approach for the description of the word formation system in the Macedonian language. The approach consists of researching groups of lexemes derived from the same root attested in the Proto‑Slavic language. According to Markovikj and Topolińska (2019), one of the most important processes that present the systematic transfer of information from the semantic continuum to the lexicon of the language is the semantic derivation. This process allows the observation of the associative sequences, which retain the basic, initial semantic components, transmitted from the man and from the real physical world to the human mental world. In this paper, the author analyzes the formal and the semantic derivation of the Proto‑Slavic root * gor‑ in the Macedonian language, which has developed several variations since the Proto‑Slavic period. The analysis of the initial semantics of the word forms derived from the root * gor‑ and its variations, showed that they all share a common semantic concept ‘covered by fire’, which refers to the inseparable relationship between man and nature.