The Evolution of Etymons Denoting an Inhabited Place in Ukrainian and English

Abstract

<jats:p>This article presents and discusses a study that focuses on appellatives that designate an inhabited place in Ukrainian and English. This research topic has not been in the limelight of contrastive linguis­tics so far. The study is based on the assumption that the notion of the inhabited place reflects the reality of the objective world associated with the residence of a group of people in a certain territory and is present in the semantic scheme and consciousness of a person. The article aims at identify­ing the basic semantic and structural changes in the vocabulary denoting an inhabited place in the Ukrainian and English languages emphasising the necessity to reveal regular semantic relations in modern languages using the data of language historical development. The corpus of the study is com­prised of seven Ukrainian and four English etymons, which are divided into five groups in Ukrainian and four groups in English according to the peculiarities of their development in the languages under consideration. The material of the present research is comprised of dictionary entries associated with the etymons denoting an inhabited place in Ukrainian and English. The results of the study indicate that appellatives signifying an inhabited place in Ukrainian and English as distantly related languag­es show similar patterns of meaning and form development in diachrony, which is reflected in the dictionaries of Ukrainian and English and supported by the data from genetically related languages.</jats:p>