Common features of English and Ukrainian lexicons

All modern languages have developed common layers of lexicon which came into being under the influence mainly of social, economic, political, historical and other extra-linguistic factors. They are the layers which form dialectal, international, specifically national etc. lexicons. The lexicon is a list of all the words in a language. It can be thought of as a list of all possible roots of a language, or all morphemes (parts of words that contain no smaller meaningful parts) that can stand alone or be combined with other parts to produce words.

Each of them has distinctive features in common. Thus, the functioning of a dialectal lexicon is restricted to a definite territory. The linguistic principles of contrastive classification of lexicon are based in all languages on the following distinguishing features of words: a) on their common lexico-grammatical nature; b) on their belonging to a common lexico-semantic group; c) on their peculiar stylistic function and meaning; d) on their denotative or connotative (or both) meanings, etc.

In accordance with the most general lexico-grammatical meanings of words they are grouped in the contrasted languages into:

a) notionals;

b) functionals.

The notionals serve as principal means of nomination and constitute the bulk of English and Ukrainian lexicon. The notionals have, apart from their often complicated semantic structure, different morphological, stylistic, syntactic features of their own.

The last of these is not of equal importance in both languages, as it is not always possible to state what part of speech the word belongs to: blue, hand, house may be both nouns and adjectives or verbs. It is mostly not so in Ukrainian, whose words clearly display their lexico-grammatical meaning: синій, добре, хата, робити, праця. Still, there are the same classes of notional words in both languages. A word may express the most general implicit (not clear at first sight, meant) meanings of substantivity, verbiality, deitic properties, adverbiality, thus representing nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, verbs, statives. As to functional, they are common except for the articles. Namely: prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections, modal verbs, modal phrases.

Common therefore are 12 lexico-grammatical classes of words each of which has mostly the same properties in the contrasted languages.

Another class of words distinguished in both languages represent common lexico-semantic groups (LSGs): Words of a LSG may have a regular synonymic relationship in English and Ukrainian: the notion of “a dwelling” unites the following row of nouns denoting different kinds of shelter: dug-out (печера, землянка), shanty (халупа), mud-house (глинянка), house, cottage, bungalow, villa, palace, apartment.

Common lexico-semantic groups can be observed among English and Ukrainian adjectives denoting dimensions; verbs of saying; local prepositions.

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