Ianenko I. Structural and Semantic Peculiarities of Floronyms in Differently Structured Languages.

The thesis focuses on the contrastive analysis of floronyms, i.e. flower names of herbaceous plants, in English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, and Ukrainian. The semantic and structural peculiarities of the flower names have been revealed. The ways of building floronyms, their structural types and productivity in the compared languages have been determined. The general and distinctive features in the structural and semantic arrangement of the flower names have been pointed out. In the semantic structure of floronyms six principal nominative-motivational features (NMF) were singled out, with each of them actualized either individually or in combination with other features in the semantic structure of a floronym. On the basis of the NMFs and their combinations the floronyms were classified into the following semantic groups: 1) the attributive floronyms; 2) the functional floronyms; 3) the possessive floronyms; 4) the perceptive floronyms; 5) the locative floronyms; 6) the temporal floronyms; 7) the combined floronyms; 8)the residual floronyms. The degree of activity of each of these NMFs in the languages under analysis has been established, the types of NMF combinations occurring in the semantic structure of floronyms have been determined. To identify the productivity of each NMF in the structure of combined floronyms the indexes of NMFs (INMF) were introduced. The etymological study of a number of floronyms has been made, the origin of the flower names has been traced. The peculiarities of metaphoric and metonymic transfers in the process of secondary nomination have been highlighted.