Taranenko O. Evaluative Realia in Modern English: Linguocultural Aspect

The paper is devoted to a linguocultural study of semantic and structural peculiarities of the evaluative realia in British and American English, which constitute a vast layer of the nominative units whose meaning is characterized by the interaction of the national culture and evaluative components and which denote objects, phenomena, customs and traditions specific of a certain socium or ethnic group. Two ideographic classes of culturally labelled language units with the evaluative meaning components have been distinguished: the evaluative onomastic realia and the evaluative realia denoted by common nouns. Both variants of English, i.e. British and American English, share 6 out of 10 ideographic groups of evaluative onomastic units and all the 5 groups of the evaluative realia denoted by common nouns. It has been revealed that positive evaluative realia prevail in both variants of English. The rational type of evaluation is characteristic of most language realia in both lingual cultures. The use of componential analysis permitted to single out common and differential evaluative semes within the language variants under consideration. The sources of the evaluative realia in English have been identified. It has been determined that the main structural type of the units under study is a word combination. The most productive derivational patterns are compounding and suffixation. The peculiarities of expressing the evaluative meaning of the English language realia in the context have been described.