IMAGES OF THE CITYAND THE VILLIAGE AS FRAGMENTS OF THE LINGUAL DESCRIPTION OF CHORNOBYL SPACE

Iryna HOTSYNETS ,
PhD (Philology), Associate professor of Pedagogic and Methodology of Teaching Foreign Languages Department, Drohobych Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University
24, Ivan Franko st, 24, Drohobych, 82100, Ukraine;
Email: hotsynets@ukr.net
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8201-2712

Heading: The city in Ukrainian linguoculture: the echo of generations
Language: Ukrainian

Abstract

Images of cities and villages for which the consequences of the Chornobyl explosion became the most tangible are outlined in Ukrainian artistic discourse with documentary authenticity. These descriptions exacerbate emotionality, the tone of tragedy, and sometimes apocalyptic coloration.
The general nominations city, village, as well as the names of specific settlements that have suffered the most from the Chоrnobyl accident, are consistently combined with the negative epithets deserted, sparsely populated, empty, empty, abandoned, dead, neglected, orphaned. Verbalizing the semantics of ‘lack of life’, ‘fading of life’, ‘desolation’, they depict and assess the state of towns and villages after the accident, in particular in connection with the situation of mass evacuation of residents.
The expressiveness of the description is intensified by the definitions of abandoned, neglected, orphaned. The overall picture of desolation is visually complemented by images of looted homes, wild pets, overgrown fields and gardens.
The verbal image of a radiation-infected town / village is especially relevant for the texts of fiction and non-fiction. The authors quite motivatedly characterize post-accident cities with the help of epithets infected, doomed, unpromising.
The associative-semantic deepening of the motif “abandoned, dead towns and villages in the exclusion zone” is provided by negative-evaluation images with the seed ‘silence’.
In the linguistic portraitl of empty, uninhabited towns and villages, modal words no, no, negative pronouns and adverbs (nobody, nowhere) and verb constructions with negative particles no and no, constructions with a preposition without perform an important text-forming function.
Indicative aspect of the description – the space above the city, the sky. This is objectively motivated by the artistic reflection of the fact that the cloud of radioactive contamination formed as a result of the explosion rose up, covering Chоrnobyl and Pripyat.
The tension of the “ground” atmosphere in Pripyat and Chernobyl is described by verbs and verb compounds with the seeds ‘intensive traffic’, which metaphorize the intensity of traffic – to take off, snatch, race, fly, tear / jerk, jump. Together, they create a cinematic description characteristic of chronicle-documentary prose. This is facilitated by verbs with the seeds ‘to move quickly’, ‘to stop suddenly’, ‘to start moving suddenly’.
Key words: Chornobyl discourse, Chornobyl dictionary, image of city, image of village, epithet, metaphor, axiological content, negative value.

REFERENCES

1. Dictionary of the Ukrainian language in 11 volumes (1970 – 1980). Kyiv. (in Ukr.)
2. Hotsynets, I.L. (2010). Associative and semantic field “Chornobyl” in modern Ukrainian fictional discourse: author’s ref. dis. … cand. philol. science. Kyiv (in Ukr.).
3. Siuta, G.M. (2007). CHОRNOBYL is a constant of Ukrainian linguistic and poetic consciousness. Linguistics. 2007. № 4 – 5. p. 44 – 49 (in Ukr.).