Psycholinguistic Content of Complements in English and Ukrainian

Abstract

The purpose of the article is: to show functions of compliments in the English and Ukrainian languages; to describe the differences between praise, flattery and compliments; to analyze a system of actual methods of modeling the associative content of the meanings of complementary expressions in the semantic field of the philological consciousness of the respondents of different ethnic groups (Englishmen and Ukrainians).
 The methods of the research are: theoretical ones – categorical and structurally-functional analysis of the texts, the methods of systematization, modeling, generalization; empirical methods – the analysis of novels, a free associative experiment.
 The results of the research. It was distinguished that among the respondents of the Ukrainian ethnic group we diagnosed the largest number of positive correlations between: the way of the explication of compliments in a form of a sentence and: syntactic constructions (phrases); semantically related compliments formed by the way of identity; creative compliments; semantically related compliments formed by the way of logical adjectivation and: semantically related compliments formed by the way of identity; semantically related compliments formed by the way of belonging, etc. The respondents of the English ethnic group had the highest number of positive correlations between: the way of the explication of compliments in a form of phrases and: semantically similar compliments; creative compliments; emotional and evaluative compliments and: semantically related compliments formed by the way of identity; semantically related compliments formed by the way of logical adjectivation, etc.
 Conclusions. We’ll formulate the psycholinguistic features of the explication of compliments in Ukrainian and English languages. Such features are: respondents of both Ukrainian and English ethnic groups are characterized by dominated subjective (ideosyncrasic) way of forming complementary expressions. English respondents are also dominated by emotional and evaluative way, while Ukrainians – by creative way in modeling the compliments. English people are more emotional in choosing phrases, word combinations and speech patterns that are complementary expressions, their speech is characterized by expressiveness and imagery. In turn, Ukrainians are more able to form creative expressions in their content, they form associative schemes, which, on the one hand, seem illogical, but, on the other hand, contain a creative context that enriches speech in a great degree, etc.