The dissertation is devoted to the study of the food vocabulary in the Eastern Podilia dialects, which are marginal dialects of the Podillia dialect and contact directly with the Middle Dnieper and steppe dialects of the southeastern dialect. The close connection of the food vocabulary with the culture and the worldview of the speakers, the need for a detailed study of the Eastern Podillia dialects at various structural levels in general and lexical-semantic in particular, the lack of a special study of the structural organization and geography of the food and drinks nominations in the Eastern Podillia dialects determined the relevance of the work.
In the dissertation the recent state of theoretical works in the field of identified linguistic problem is studied and the structural organization of the vocabulary of the Eastern Podilian dialects is modeled; the composition, structural organization and semantics of lexemes on the nomination of food and drinks in the Eastern Podillia dialects are analyzed; the methods and means of nomination in the thematic subject group are determined; nomination processes in the Eastern Podillia dialects are outlined; there are tendencies’ characteristics of expansional behavior of food and drink nominations and internal division of the studied dialects; the relation between the fixed vocabulary and the corresponding nominative units of other Ukrainian dialects is established.
The subject of the research is the nominative and semantic processes, the motivation of the representatives of lexico-semantic groups and their distribution to denote the general nominations of food, time of food consumption, food of plant origin, food of animal origin, and drinks.
The core of the thematic food vocabulary group forms the nation-wide, literary-normative lexemes and words recorded in other dialects of the Ukrainian language. However, there are many lexical units that are specific in the studied dialects, which can be qualified as endemisms.
For the studied thematic vocabulary group, defining are the differential signs of 'method of preparation', 'the main ingredient'. The motivation model 'ingredient' → 'the name of a dish', which is implemented with the help of suffixal derivation, metonymy, analytical nomination, expressed by attributive and substantive phrases, is common to all the lexical-semantic groups under study.
The food and drink vocabulary is not genetically homogeneous. Most lexemes are of specific origin, but a minor part is borrowings from Slavic (Polish, Russian) and non-Slavic (Romanian, Italian, Turkic, Chinese, East German, German, French, English, German) languages. Foreign language tokens in the studied dialects are assimilated at the phonetic level.
