Occasional coinage as a manifestation of ethnic verbal thinking specificity: With reference to Galician-Ruthenian folk paroemias collected and arranged by Ivan Franko

Abstract

The paper discusses occasional coinages found among items registered and published by Ivan Franko in his Galician-Ruthenian folk paroemias collection (1901—1910). These highly expressive entities represent the original verbal thinking of the 19th century Galicians and exhibit the great potential of the Ukrainian national language system as well as the specificity of the Galician linguistic world picture. The author elucidates their peculiar semantic and derivational features as compared with those of occasional coinages presented in M. Nomys’ paroemia collec tion, and so determines whether they are all-Ukrainian or specifically Galician. Signifi cantly, Franko supplied each entry in his collection with a commentary, which enables a re searcher to grasp the meaning of a paroemia within the framework of the 19th century Gali cians’ linguistic world picture, the communicative situation within which the item was used, and its underlying stem. The most productive was the occasional derivation of lexemes. Occasional substantives were mostly formed by means of suffixal and confixal derivation as well as composition (sometimes combined with suffixation). Occasional adjectives are few and, as a rule, derived by suffixation, and adverbial coinages are still more infrequent. The author demonstrates the richness of the modes of derivation, mostly occasional, that were employed in acts of linguistic creativity, as well as tracing and analysing instances of semantic occasional formations. Keywords: occasional coinage, means of derivation, paroemias, the Ukrainian language of the 19th century, the linguistic world picture of the 19th century Ukrainians