Podolyan I. National semantic idiosyncrasies of Ukrainian, English and German phytonyms (contrastive ethnopsycholinguistic analysis)

The dissertation is devoted to the subject of semantic correspondence (correlation) between words possessing the same denotational component in different languages. Universal and nationally specific semantic features of 50 generally used plant names correlating between the Ukrainian, English and German languages were defined by means of a free association experiment. The participants were representatives of Ukraine, USA and Germany. To investigate the lingual and ethnocultural background of semantic divergencies between the plant names a range of lexicographic, folklore and ehtnographic sources was used. A special attention was paid to comparison of the correlating phytonyms on the basis of their symbolic connotations. The latter were determined in the association experiment and examined on the subject of their traditional use in the 20th century's poetry. Analysis of the experiment participants' association behaviour resulted in a number of conclusions about Ukrainians', Americans' and Germans' mental representations of plants, as well as about peculiarities of the three nations' world outlooks.