THE CONCEPT OF “MOTHER” IN LANGUAGE CREATION OF B. ANTONENKO-DAVYDOVYCH

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of the individual and authorial representation of the MOTHER concept in the creative work of B. Antonenko- Davydovych, outlined as one of the main concepts of the cultural and spiritual life of the people, thoroughly embodied in Ukrainian ethnoculture. Emphasis is placed on increasing the interest of modern Ukrainian linguistics in the cognitive aspect of language research in connection with the study of the conceptual picture of the world through the prism of the Ukrainian literary tradition. It is clarified how the language interprets the world, realizing the mental features of the nation and its system of values. In scientific research, it was noted that an important and necessary task is the formation of as complete a picture as possible of the linguistic picture of the world of Ukrainians, manifested in the image of the mother, which makes it possible to talk about the national and cultural identity of Ukrainians. It is demonstrated that the researched concept appears as a macroformation, a multidimensional mental unit with a multilevel dynamic structure, acts as a semantic construct of human consciousness, which stores information about certain fragments of mothers’ lives, their relationships with children, family ties, etc. It was determined that the contextual functioning of the MOTHER concept in the artist’s prose texts testifies to a harmoniously refined, balanced combination of the author’s artistic realization of the concept with the worldview orientations of the Ukrainian ethnic group. The semantics of linguistic means forming the core and periphery of the concept with the further process of cognitive interpretation were described and analyzed. An overview of the types of semantic components, or semantic representations, of this concept was provided and the scientific perspective of its research in various genres of Ukrainian fiction was outlined. The content potential of the MOTHER concept was characterized, expanded by epithets, metaphors, images-symbols that exert a certain suggestive influence on the reader, and the use of these means is determined by their ability to act as a tool for object recognition and its further artistic embodiment. The peculiarities of the linguistic-philosophical and artistic-aesthetic embodiment of emotional-personal qualities, psychophysical states, culturally oriented behavioral tactics of various characters were illustrated, through which the concept of MOTHER is particularly represented in the semantic space of B. Antonenko-Davydovych’s prose.