Protsenko I. Structural and Semantic Characteristics of the Lexis Denoting People by their Age in the Spanish and Ukrainian Languages

The thesis focuses on the comprehensive comparative analysis of the lexical units denoting people by their age in the Spanish and Ukrainian languages aimed at pointing out their common and differential characteristics. As a result of the research models for building words denoting people by their age have been identified, productiveness of derivational means for the lexical units under analysis has been determined, the number of nouns in the lexical-semantic groups of the vocabulary under consideration has been specified, the dominants for the above lexical-semantic groups and the peculiarities of their peripheries have been distinguished. Analysis of the lexical units, i.e. the nouns and substantivized parts of speech that denote people by their age in Spanish (421 units) and Ukrainian (478 units) has shown that the most productive way of word-formation in Spanish and Ukrainian is semantic, whereas in Ukrainian the morphological way is of paramount importance. Within the semantic means metaphorization is most productive, while the suffixal way prevails among the morphological means. The lexical units that denote people by their age in both languages fall into five structurally dissimilar lexical-semantic groups: a child, an adolescent, a young person, an adult, an elderly person. It has been found that the lexical units with negative connotations are more often used to nominate people in accordance with their age in Spanish, whereas the use of positively coloured words is characteristic of Ukrainian.