Hnatiuk L. Hryhoriy Skovoroda's language awareness and language practice as seen within the framework of the Old Ukrainian bookish tradition

The dissertation's subject matter is reconstruction of the language awareness of Hryhoriy Skovoroda, an outstanding Ukrainian philosopher of the 18th c. as well as his language practice within the framework of the language awareness of the Old Ukrainian society and the Old Ukrainian literary-bookish tradition of the period from the end of the 16th through the 18th c., with reference to some processes and phenomena of New Standard Ukrainian. Employing most advanced theories and methods of present-day cognitive linguistics, linguistic culturology and conceptology, the author has made an overall reconstruction of Hryhoriy Skovoroda's language awareness and that of the Old Ukrainian society contemporary with him. She has also developed a method of reconstructing Old Ukrainian language awareness, which determined language practice of that time, as well as a set of criteria for assessing, as non- / Ukrainian, phenomena in the history of Standard Ukrainian considered ambiguous from the viewpoint of modern language awareness. Having examined Skovoroda's all extant texts (checking most of them against original manuscripts), and also monuments of Old Ukrainian, she has proponed a new interpretation of phonetic, graphic, lexical and grammatical features found in Skovoroda's texts, arguing that his language was an integral system comprising entities of various origin yet functionally identical to Ukrainian language awareness of that time, as well as demonstrating his ability to switch to various language-cultural codes. The author's findings provide a number of insights in the way Old Standard Ukrainian developed and its relationships to New Standard Ukrainian, also discovering links between Skovoroda's philosophical concepts as verbalized in his texts and Old Ukrainian Baroque tradition regarding its use of word-formation, onomatopoeia, pun, figures of speech and tropes.