What modern lviv people inherited from the ruffians of interwar period (on the issues of batiar slang actualization)

Abstract

Background. Currently Lviv returns so called batiar’s culture and traditions. Moreover, batiar’s phenomenon of interwar period has already inspired modern Ukrainian writers. For instance, Yurii Vynnychuk popularizes this subculture with his books, public lectures, blogs etc. In this article, we have focused on the analysis of such prose texts by Yurii Vynnychuk as “Tsenzor sniv” (Censor of Dreams), “Lehendy Lvova” (Legends of Lviv), “Knaipy Lvova” (Pubs of Lviv), “Tango smerti” (Tango of Death). Despite the fact that there are studies that deal with actualization of vocabulary, there are no studies based on these prose texts and batiar slang in particular.Purpose. The main goal of this article is to investigate the process of actualization of socially marked vocabulary. Particular attention has been paid to the batiar slang, which was one of the variants of colloquial speech in interwar Lviv. Furthermore, the purpose of this research is to analyze the slang of this social group as linguistic and psychological characteristics of the characters, to distinguish the main functions of batiar slang in the modern Ukrainian prose texts.Methods. The following methods and principles used to study sociolinguistic phenomena have been selected: method of collecting linguistic data from novels written by Yurii Vynnychuk in order to analyze the material. Moreover, traditional methods of linguistic analysis (for example, semantic analysis, which investigates the meaning of vocabulary items by explaining what sense relations hold between them, and descriptive method to distinguish the lexical groups of vocabulary) have been used.Results. This article has identified semantic structure and stylistic features of the actualized batiar’s vocabulary. The results indicate that batiar slang in the novels by Yurii Vynnychuk has been used to demonstrate Lviv’s life during the interwar period. The function of this vocabulary is to describe the characters and their linguistic behavior. Moreover, batiar slang helps to portray the environment in which the events take place.Article received 23.05.2018