Skidanova K. Structural and motivational features of American ethnophobisms.

The paper focuses on the analysis of American ethnophobisms (AE) as special linguistic units with a pejorative axiological connotation, nicknaming ethnic and racial groups. The study is aimed at determining and describing structural and motivational peculiarities of the lexical units under discussion. The research has resulted in determination of the principal ways and means of AE derivation, and elucidation of the motivational features of American pejorative ethnic nominative units. It has been found that AEs comprehensively reflect the content of the process of American derogatory ethnic nomination fulfilling the national linguistic mapping of the world; the peculiarities of ethnic and cultural stereotypes verbalized in AE; the ability of the linguistic units under consideration to imprint, accumulate and re-create a certain meaningful fragment of reality in human consciousness; the choice of prototype forms representing verbalized knowledge of the Americans about "us" and "them". The structural analysis of AEs has yielded a classification with five main means of replenishing the corpus of the lexical units under investigation (derivation, semantic derivation, blending, shortening and borrowing), productivity of the ways and means of the word-building constituents and derivational formants has been determined. Classification of AEs in accordance with three nominative types, i.e. "a human being in the society", "a human being and the environment" and "a human being as such" has been made, with the groups of the motivational features of these lexical units defined within each type.