Martin and Doka (2011) define grief as a reaction to loss, which results from the tension caused by an individual’s desire to “maintain their assumptive world as it was before the loss, accommodate to a newly emerging reality resulting from the loss, and incorporate this reality into an assumptive world” (p. 18). In Western society, expectations for appropriate grieving reactions following the loss of a loved one are that emotional distress is expected and necessary following loss, that the emotions following loss should be worked through and that an intense phase of distress eventually ends, allowing closure and resolution. Furthermore, societal norms governing grief are shaped by gender, with women expected to be expressive in their responses to loss, and disciplined if their responses do not adhere to these gender-based norms. HBO’s Girls, created by Lena Dunham and co-produced by Judd Apatow, charts the lives of four upper class, white girls in their mid-twenties, navigating life in Brooklyn, New York. In Season Three’s Episode 4, “Dead Inside”, Hannah’s editor, David Pressler-Goings, is found dead, and Hannah’s reaction is to be more concerned about the fate of her e-book than the loss of her “champion”. Although Hannah’s non-normative response to the death of her editor could work to dismantle gendered norms of grieving through showing what women’s mourning practices might look like when not based upon the experiences of women who conform closely to patterns of heterosexual marriage where domestic commitments are privileged over an independent career, the responses of those around Hannah, particularly the men, function to reveal and reinforce traditional ideological codes about grief and grieving, and hysteria as a model of what “appropriate” grieving should look like for women.

The article deals with the linguocultural potential of associative fields of stimuli divchyna, divchynka, divcha, divulya, divaha, that are important ethnocultural signs for Ukrainians. As a result of the free‑association experiment, it has been established that the reactions obtained can be distributed to three groups: universal (available in each stimulus), frequency reaction (occur as answers to three or more stimuli) and unique (are relevant for one or two stimuli). It was discovered that among the universal and frequency reactions there predominates the stereotypical characteristics of the object that reflect the positive, idealized qualities of a young woman and that these are basic components of the Ukrainian language picture of the world. It has been found that unique reactions arise as a result of the actualization of the nucleus of the objective‑conceptual semantics of the word, behind which stands a denotation, and that this may also be the result of stylistic stimulus colour. The linguistic‑cultural analysis of reactions confirmed the statement on the multidimensionality of human memory, which certifies the existence of words‑stimuli simultaneously in three planes – verbal, subject, and actional. The study has demonstrated that the word in this man‑centric dimension has a marked information potential, and constitutes a sign of folk culture, which retains its own linguistic, linguocultural, and encyclopaedic information.