The lexeme верх: its phonetic and semantic features, and derivative resources in south-western dialects of Ukrainian

Abstract

The lexeme верх: its phonetic and semantic features, and derivative resources in south-western dialects of Ukrainian The paper is an attempt to analyse the word верх ‘top’, and to construct a derivational nest for the root -верх-. The source material was excerpted from linguistic atlases, dialectal dictionaries, dialectal recordings, and other specialist studies. The focus lies primarily on the phonetic, semantic, and wordformative aspect. The analysed words display phonetic features that are typical for south-western dialects of Ukrainian, as well as their semantic and derivational variation. The resulting derivational nest is a complicated system of cognate words that cover four different levels of word formation (the first level is the base word верх). Dialectal data are provided in tables. The examples show that an analysis of the system of derivatives is able to: identify the most complete phonetic variants of words, find semantic variants of each derivative, compare UD derivatives of the root -верх- (-wierzch-) with PD, describe specific dialectal word-formative patterns which are not characteristic of the standard language, and to record an ancient phenomenon.

Keywords

• ukraiński dialekt południowo-zachodni
• gniazdo słowotwórcze
• cechy dialektalne
• fonetyka
• semantyka
• słowotwórstwo