Zaluzhna O. Privative Verbs in English and Ukrainian.

The thesis focuses on the contrastive semantic analysis of privative verbs (e.g. to cut off / відрізати, to steal / красти) in modern English and Ukrainian. Using the system of the criteria worked out for the selection of the units for analysis, the corpus of privative verbs in both contrasted languages was compiled. A pattern for contrastive description of the semantics of these verbs in distantly related languages, which involves their actantial structure, word-building and stylistic peculiarities, was developed. The classification of privative verbs considering the predicative and argumentative information has been made. The relationship between the stylistic peculiarities of English and Ukrainian privative verbs and belonging of the latter to certain lexico-semantic groups has been traced. The most productive word-building patterns and the typical meanings they convey have been described. The peculiarities of the actantial structure of the verbs under analysis have been discussed. The interdependence between the semantics and the morphological structure of these verbs, and filling up of the positions of the possessive subject and the possessive object in the sentence has been established. Privative semantics in English and Ukrainian verbs demonstrates more common than distinctive features (the basic types, subtypes, groups and subgroups largely coincide), which is indicative of the fact that the contrasted languages are isomorphic in terms of expressing privative meanings. The allomorphic features of English and Ukrainian privative verbs involve the productivity of the semantic types (subtypes, groups, subgroups); the semantic lacunae have been observed exclusively within single subgroups.