THE CONCEPT WOMAN IN THE WORKS OF UKRAINIAN POETS AT THE END OF THE XXth – EARLY XXIst CENTURY

Abstract

Modern Ukrainian poetry claims the role of verbalizer and representativer of the perception of the world by the native speaker. The concept WOMAN is called a universal overcultural concept, which simultaneously absorbs national specifics (in colloquial speech) and individual author's vision (in literary texts). The system of lexems and lexems’ combinations to denote a woman, recorded in poetic works, is one of the means of verbal representation of the concept WOMAN in Ukrainian language picture of the world. Isolation and analysis of nominatives for a woman designation provide an opportunity to clarify a set of language tools which conceptualize a woman in the Ukrainian language space. Thus, our article is devoted to the analysis of lexical units to denote the concept WOMAN in the works of Ukrainian poets of the end of XXth – early XXIst centuries. The interpretation of the word “woman” in dictionaries is traced. The stipulated means of representation of the WOMAN concept in Ukrainian postmodern poetry are singled out and this concept is structured with the designation of the nuclear zone, semi-periphery and periphery. The nuclear zone of the WOMAN concept is formed by the nominees: a woman, a young lady, a little, you, she, a native, beloved, a beautiful woman, my good one. Nearby the nuclear zone we fix lexems and lexems’ combinations: eyes, blue eyes, tears, blue eyes, look, sly look; lips, eating lips, burning lips, kissed lips, elastic lips, wet lips, beloved lips, hands,a smile, a laughter. The semi-periphery includes: prostitute, whore, slut, lousy bitch, bitch, woman for two hundred hryvnias. The peripheral zone is represented by such concepts as: stockings, legs, Eve, ivory, honey dew, luxurious land, cradle, coffin, faith, virus, incense, daily bread. The concept WOMAN is belonged to the anthropomorphic class of concepts, structured by gender and biosocial subclasses. The peculiarity of verbalization of this concept in the Ukrainian poetry of the studying period is a combination of opposite ideas about a woman: a beautiful, a beautiful woman, tender and slutty woman, a woman of easy behavior (and the second idea is given without any condemnation, rather just a statement of fact or even a certain gamble). Thus, in the poetic works of recent decades there is a coarsening, depoetization of a woman, often the attitude to her as to an object of aesthetic pleasure and sexual pleasure, which indicates a decrease in the high purpose of artistic poetry.