Ukrainian Socio-Political Term System: Origins and Formation

Abstract

The article is about socio-and-political terminology and its peculiarities that are caused by linguistic factors which make it different from scientific and technical terminology. It doesn’t have such isolation as another term systems have. Socio-and-political Ukrainian terminology is relatively stable and fixed lexical-semantic system which is in a state of continuous movement and progressive improvement. Сhanges in the political lexicon are documented in written sources, particularly in dictionaries. There is the first lexicographic work which contains military, biological, medical and socio-political terms – Лексикон славено-латинський (Lexicon slavic-latin) by Epiphanii Slavynetskyi (1649). Ukrainian social-and-political terms of the late XIX – early XX cent. are fully revealed by I. Franko in his famous scientific works on the socio-political and socio-economic issues. Socio-political vocabulary simultaneously with other lexical and thematic groups was popular among linguists in the language analysis of individual documental sights by B. Khmelnytskyi, Lviv Stauropegion fraternities, historical-and-memoir prose of the first half of the 19th cent. Ideological differentiation of society in the early 90ies of XX cent. caused the reformation of political speech, that all appeared in the renewal conceptual and formal content. This includes: 1) large ammount of lexical innovations to describe new social and political reality; 2) the process of renaming, converting the key nominations of society, expansion of thematic areas because of previous taboo subject; 3) the emergence of new objects and political nominations; 4) the new rating system, the existence of double assessments of the same phenomenon; 5) changes inside pragmatic assessment structures, the negative vector moved from external to internal political areas; 6) formation of a new stylistic norm: the trend to simplification, democratization of broadcasting; 7) approaching to the spoken speech, rendering the stylistically reduced elements; 8) brief presentation, the desire to get rid of irrelevant information. All these are active language creative processes could not be unnoticed by researchers. The development of Ukrainian media language in the pre-October and later periods is shown; its role is defined in enriching and normalization of Ukrainian language: lexical, grammatical structure and spelling; creation of journalistic and scientific style.