The article presents the results of a psycholinguistic study of the concept JOY based on the materials of the Ukrainian Associative Dictionary by S. Martinek. The associative meaning of the word joy has been identified and a comparative analysis has been conducted, juxtaposing the obtained results with the lexicographic definitions and survey data provided by the sociological group “Rating”. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the major psychological theories of emotions and various linguistic approaches to studying emotions. All reactions of the conducted free associative experiment to the word-stimulus joy were classified according to the structures of knowledge representation, with their quantitative ratio determined. The research has shown that the emotion of joy is described by the hyperonyms emotion, feeling, mood. The core of the associative field of the concept JOY in Ukrainian linguaculture is formed by happiness, cheerfulness, merriment, satisfaction, pleasure. The most frequent characteristics of joy are great and sincere, and the most typical oppositions – sadness and sorrow. Joy is most frequently associated with laughter and smiling as an outward expression of emotion, with the colours yellow and white as well as with light and sun. Among the reasons for joy, life draws the greatest number of reactions while family, friends, home are of significant importance for Ukrainians.

The article analyzes the language means by which the intensity of emotional processes in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian is reflected on the example of the names of emotions that are part of the “compassion” group. By the intensity of emotions, we mean a quantitative assessment of the quality of the emotional process relative to a certain norm. Verbalizers of the intensity of emotional experiences include lexemes describing the power of the emotions themselves and the impact of the emotions on a person. The characteristics of the power of the manifestation of emotions are objectified most often with the help of adjectives and adverbs. Verbalization of the power of the influence of emotional experiences on a person in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian can occur by objectifying the temperature characteristics of feelings, as well as through association with images of fluid and fire. Besides intensity on the quantitative side, a feeling is also characterized by duration – the time interval between the beginning and the end of an emotion. In terms of duration, the emotions of the “compassion” group in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian are described as sudden and short-lived states.

The paper deals with elucidating the semantic changes and pragmatic effects of the precedent phenomenon in modern Ukrainian media discourse. The examples chosen for analysis have appeared within Ukrainian discourse following Ukraine’s independence in 1991. It verbalizes one of the valuable concepts – ‘patriotism’. Taken into consideration is the phrase coined by Yevhen Chykalenko, about “love to the depth of a pocket” with references to its use in contemporary discourse. The research is based on the 13th version of the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian and on the Ukrainian Language Corpus test version. The functional variant peculiarities of this expression are described, and its truncated derivatives and its lexical shifts as well. The difference between the origin of Chykalenko’s phrase and its current modifications is deduced from the semantic-pragmatic point of view. The paper reveals the role the above mentioned phrase plays in the formatting of new expressions. Outlined is the manipulative potential of this precedent expression in the realization of the author’s intentions.

The situation of perception, its structure, types and their verbalization attract the attention of not only psychologists but also linguists. Hearing, like sight, is one of the main sensory channels in human life. In this study, carried out with the help of lexical-semantic analysis, semantic-stylistic analysis and contextual analysis, the role of the vocabulary describing sounds in defining the situation of a miracle is presented (“miracle-vision”, “miraclephenomenon”, “voices from heaven”, etc.) and its relation to miracle markers. Miracles were chosen from Житiя святыхъ на русском языке изложенные по руководству Четиӽ Миней святителя Димитрия Ростовского, in which miracles are manifestations of God’s omnipotence. The research focuses mainly on verbs that describe sound and verbs that describe auditory perception. The study found that in addition to verbs describing sound and verbs describing auditory perception, miracle markers are also verbs describing visual and tactile perception. The quantitative and qualitative analysis allowed us to conclude that the verb of intentional auditory perception слушать does not occur in the text as a marker of a miracle situation, which may indicate the hagiographer’s goal – to show the unpredictability of a miracle.

This article is about the dyadic narration (second-person narration) used in Viktor Pelevin’s short story The Ontology of Childhood. Since this type of narration is not widely known among Polish researchers, narratologists, and literary scholars, the article begins with a presentation of the state of research in Poland. The basic features of this kind of narration and the differences between it and the typical types of speech in first-person and third-person narration are discussed. The short story The Ontology of Childhood by Viktor Pelevin is constructed using a second-person narration, which is the realisation of the author’s strategy being about building a relationship with the reader. Through the second-person narration, the reader is invited (drawn in) to the world presented in the work and is urged to identify with the narrator-main character. Eliminating the boundary between the protagonist and the reader allows the work to generalise experiences and emotions, which – at first individual – by the end of the work gain a universal dimension.

This paper traces the interconnection of Soviet ideology and development of the ponyatiye term (понятие, Rus., back translation – concept) in the humanitarian sciences of the USSR, particularly in Soviet linguistics of the 20th century. Analyzing scientific literature of the Soviet epoch, as well as works written by the Marxist-Leninist founding fathers, the author demonstrates that interpretation of the term was limited by the theory of dialectic materialism and the ideological needs of an authoritative socio-political system. This system was interested in denying the capacity of language to participate in the construction of concepts and deprive the mind of critical attention. It was objectionable also to declare the subjectivity and variability of the categorization process because it was not allowed to question the monopoly of dominant ideological beliefs and the efficiency of Soviet propaganda. At the same time, in American and European cognitive linguistics scholars were forming a new theory of categorization and gradually reinterpreting the notion of concept which, as well as ponyatiye, is used to denote the results of categorization. Its subjective variability, interference with sensory images and capacity to be constructed was accepted. There are reasons to assert that the term понятие did not undergo the same transformation as the term concept in the English linguistic tradition because of the ideological restrictions. It was the term kontsept (концепт, Rus., back translation – concept) that absorbed features which were rejected by the term ponyatiye because of dialectic materialism. This new term came into Soviet and post-Soviet linguistics at exactly the time of the collapse of the USSR and the decline of Marxist ideology. In the author’s opinion, this coincidence in chronology is indirect proof of the conclusion that ideological factors affected the term ponyatiye in Soviet and Russian linguistics.

The dominant feature of foreign speech is the availability of appeals, because they indicate the opposition «addressee – sender», reflecting the speaker’s attitude to the interlocutor, to the environment, certifying the status of a person, and adapting us to the perception of information and to some extent reactions to it. The aim of the article is to characterize the semantic and functional features of vocatives as integral components of foreign speech by the example of prayer texts (458 prayers are analyzed). Very often such constructions in prayers have additional means of dissemination, including artistic definitions, homogeneous affixes, separate members of the speech itself and even predicative units that we rarely find in other speech patterns. Appeals to God, the Mother of God and servants of God (apostles, angels, saints, etc.) are productive in vocative structures. The names of religious attributes, believers and evil spirits are used less actively in this role. In addition, the believer’s constant appeal to higher powers gives the prayer discourse signs of dialogue, although there is no reverse communication.

The article is devoted to travelogues written by Ivan Kovtun and Ivan Mikitenko, poorly researched authors of Ukrainian literature, representatives of the phenomenon of the Executed Renaissance. The article aims to identify the key features of the Ukrainian travelogue that were formed during 1924-1925 years within the joint Soviet literature process. The analyzed texts represent two main themes of travel literature of 1920s: the ‘own’ space of Soviet republics and ‘other’ space of foreign, bourgeois countries. Despite inheriting ideological rhetoric and the main tendencies of the Soviet travelogue, the position of an ‘author of proletarian literature’ doubles and deepens regarding the narrator’s hypostasis as a Ukrainian writer. Ukrainian discourse (Ukrainian land, language, culture, literature) is set on both – the personal and literary – levels, particularly it occurs in specific sensitivities about one’s ‘own’ and ‘other’ space.

The research material in this article is V. Nabokov’s short story A Nursery Tale (1926), which, by virtue of the literary genre signalled in the title, disposes us to consider the author’s communicative intention. The methodological inspiration for the research is M. Bakhtin’s genological reflection and his concept of the genre as “a representative of creative memory in the process of literature development”; W. Propp’s study and J. Derrida’s idea about fairy tales has also proved helpful. Analysis and interpretation of the short story A Fairy Tale has allowed one to distinguish particular elements and devices aimed at the short story genre transformation with special regard to the titular (fairy-tale) form of expression. The special status of the work’s protagonist is demonstrated, his creative activity understood as a kind of game, whose creator and actor is the protagonist himself, while the realisation of his erotic desire is treated as a way of regarding Femininity and of opening to “the other”, precisely connected in Nabokov’s short story with the female figure. On the parabolic/fabulous level the hero’s dream (collecting “a harem of women”) is interpreted as a literary device – an expression of romantic irony revealing the opposing forces governing human existence, a conflict between everyday reality and the world of creative fantasy/imagination. In consequence, Nabokov’s A Nursery Tale is read as an example of a narrative parabolic fairy tale.

The article is devoted to the concept a cemetery in memoirs about forced relocation from flood zones in Ukraine as a result of the construction of hydroelectric power plants. Fragments about the relocation of cemeteries are given. Studies are folk beliefs, nominative vocabulary for events, loci, characters, subjects, permanent themes and main folklore plots. The following main ideas are highlighted: the impossibility of any complete relocation of a cemetery; interfering with a cemetery contains potential danger and provokes the wrath of the dead; the installation of a tombstone cross restores the sacredness of the tomb, consolidates the resettlement community, and actualizes the memory of its historical past.

The article analyzes the letters of L. Dobychin from 1924-1936. It reveals the main characteristics of the images of the author and the addressee, explicit and implicit forms of the author’s self-expression, the author’s epistolary intentions. The article shows that for Dobychin letters are not only external, but also internal representant of a personality, the most important way of formation of the image of “I” in its subjective and objective significance. The uniqueness of the author’s epistolary personality is determined by absolute sincerity and uncompromising judgment, etiquette pedantry, the combination of ironic and sentimental intonations, acute experience of his relations with the world and people, idealization of writerly status, orientation to the ideal norm both in aesthetic and in behavioral sense. The image of the addressee of the letters is partly mythologized and determined by the type of relationship between the correspondents and the role chosen by the addressee. The variations of the author’s “ego” and the change of the addressees’ role functions provide an expansion of the semantic and aesthetic potential of the image of the addressee and the correspondence as a whole.

The works of Fyodor Sologub, unlike most Russian symbolists, such as Alexander Blok, are described by researchers and contemporary writers (Vladyslav Khodasevich and others) as ‘static’, alien to the idea of path, evolution. The aim of the article is to break this academic stereotype and thought patterns about the author of The Little Demon. Analysis of the research material: critical literary statements and selected poems by the poet, allows us to notice his spiritual and aesthetic evolution. Firstly: in fulfilling his artistic vision, Sologub not only does not “tread water” (“topchetsya na odnom meste”, as Leo Shestov stated), but, as Maria Cymborska‑Leboda writes, his poetic thought remains in motion, i.e. there are noticeable ‘points’ on his artistic way, to which he reaches. Thus, in the words of the mentioned researcher, in a certain sense, like Blok, he is a ‘path poet’, while remaining faithful to himself – his ‘sweet dream’ (paradise). Secondly: the interpretation of the symbol of the ‘path’ and related concepts that fit within the semantic field of the poet’s works point to the biblical sources of his thinking – the author’s lyrical subject often takes the form of a pilgrim, a wanderer traversing the ‘desert of life’, struggling with the world (мироборчество), he conducts a dialogue, often turning into a dispute with the Creator (богоборчество). This dialogue, subjected to reflection in the article, is interpreted as one of the manifestations of the spiritual growth of the lyrical hero and the poet himself (the vertical and existential dimension of the concept – homo viator).

The articles attempts at the reconstruction of the image of America in letters and memoirs of Dmytro Chyzhevs’kyy, Yuriy Shevel’ov, and Wiktor Weintraub, East‑European scholars who after WWII greatly contributed to the formation of the image of Slavic civilization in the West. They immigrated to the US in late 1940s – early 1950s expecting Harvard to be the site for their further academic endeavours since the after – WW II Europe could not satisfy their academic needs. Interaction with the American academic community developed differently for each scholar, which had its impact on their further careers. Impressions from America and Harvard in particular in their correspondence generally testifies to the their hopes and expectations, while memoirs contain a balanced or even distanced re‑evaluation of those. Historical context within which these writings are viewed suggests that for each scholar the image of America was dynamic and different due to their age, personality, character, previous immigrant life experience, and their cultural background and academic worldview. Unlike Chyzhevs’kyy, these factors suited well Shevel’ov and Weintraub in terms of adjustment to the reality and expectations of the New World. Further study of these scholars’ biographies from this perspective seems particularly topical under the circumstances of recent reformatting of the Slavic Studies as a discipline.

The article reveals the peculiarities of the urban text in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories. The image of Odessa is analyzed as a poetological dominant of the cycle. The originality of the artistic image and the text of Odessa is considered as the relationship between the semantic setting in the social and cultural focus, the historical image of the city and its perception in the minds of townspeople. Thus, the author focuses on the space locus that serves as a marker of the Odessa text and identifies the city of Odessa (Moldavanka, Peresyp, Privoz), the images of the Odessa landscape in their symbolic interpretation and the image of Odessa man as closely related components of the artistic structure of the cycle and the Odessa text itself. Analysis of the stories distinguishes that the meaning‑forming and structure‑forming functions of the Odessa topoi are subordinated to a single goal – to create and typify the image of Odessa man. What is important is not the city itself as a socio‑cultural organism, but its perception in the urban consciousness. The key fact to reveal the specifics of the Odessa text and the Odessa consciousness is the idea of the decline – the collapse of the communal and tribal consciousness as the decline of the Odessa ethnos realized in the conflict of personal and social principles, the inverse comprehension of Rabelaisian corporality motif, the images of the sunset landscape and in the irony, which discredits as false both the gang life romance and the appearing concept of a new world. The city depicted by I. Babel on the threshold of the 1917 revolution is interpreted as a city at the decline of culture. The writer depicts the end or the decline of old Odessa through the end of Odessa man and the collapse of the Odessa ethnos. Thus, in I. Babel’s Odessa cycle, there is a transformation of the traditional image of sunny Odessa into the image of a city fallen into decline. The features of the image of Odessa man regarded as indications of the declining culture are determined in the article.

The paper focuses on artifact denominations – compound idiomatic phrases that encode the information on a person’s anthropometric characteristics (those of body, virtues, behavior, etc.) in artifact‑naming items (based on the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages). The study elaborates on the system of significative and denotative descriptors – two‑component entities that represent a metaphoric mapping of the source (significative descriptors) and target (denotative descriptors) domains. The significative descriptors are reduced to the classes of the artifact signifiers; among those are the classes of clothes, household articles, food, weapon, facilities, transport and symbols. The denotative descriptors represent the classes of the artifact signified; among those are the classes of a person’s social, value‑based and semiotic characteristics. The ultimate goal of the study is to characterize regular relations between the two classes of descriptors in the contrasted languages. The analysis provided in the paper proceeds from the assumption that any artifact‑naming process takes place on the basis of extended stereotyping – a cognitive mechanism that provides for the encoding of additional, complementary senses in artifact‑naming items. The study concludes that artifact‑naming processes in the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages respond to the communities’ demands for representing a person’s internal, spiritual world within the concept of external material objects (artifacts). The analysis reveals the tendency of artifact designations towards a social, axiological and semiotic conceptualization of a person’s artifact world.

The article substantiates the importance of using an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language personality. A variety of scientific concepts about the content, level model and structural‑component composition of the linguistic persona are demonstrated; information on the formation of this phenomenon in the field of related humanities, in particular in the relationship of linguistics, literature, psycholinguistics, psychology, medicine. Within the framework of psycholinguistics, classifications of language personality depending on normative or specific speech are distinguished. Traced is the migration of the term ‘accentuation’ from medicine to linguistics.