Jushkova S. Reciprocal Verbs and Their Constructions in German and Ukrainian.

The thesis is devoted to the contrastive study of the reciprocal verbs and their constructions in German and Ukrainian. The structure and semantics of reciprocal verbs in German and Ukrainian have been studied for the first time, and the contrastive analysis of reciprocal verbs within the scope of the theory of diatheses has been carried out. Essential features of the semantics of reciprocity have been identified and the means of its expression in the languages under comparison have been established, changes occurring in the morphological, syntactic, semantic and reference structures of reciprocal verbs during diathesis transformation of the reciprocal construction into the non-reciprocal one have been analyzed. The structure and semantics of the motivation stem and the derivative reciprocal verbs have been described, means of manifestation of the symmetric actants of the reciprocal constructions in the position of the subject and the object have been determined, and the types of diatheses and the degree of their creativity in German and Ukrainian have been identified. The three-level model of description of the reciprocal verbs, their structural and semantic-syntactic classification proposed in the thesis can be used in lexical typology and the semantics of syntax.