REFLECTION OF LOVE FOR THE LAND AS THE MENTAL FEATURE OF THE UKRAINIANS IN THE EASTERN STEPPE DIALECT TEXT

Abstract

The article is concerned with peculiarities of lingual resources meant to express love for the land as the mental feature of the Ukrainians. On the basis of a dialect text-memoir monologue spotted in 2012 as the eastern steppe dialect in the village of Krasnoarmiiske of Novoazovsk Rural Area in Donetsk Region (nowadays the village of Khreshchatytske of Novoazovsk Community in Kalmius Rural Area of Donetsk Region (seized by the Russians in 2014)) from Hamalii Mykola born in 1949, a local resident (pensioner) whose education is 8 years of study at secondary school. Vitality of the present research does not lie in the insufficient state of study of the newly built Ukrainian dialect areal of the south of Donetsk Region alone. Vitality of the present research also lies in the need to preserve the national dialect archive under the conditions of Russia/Ukraine war that caused forced migration and significant reduction in the number of dialect speakers, in particular in the number of indigenous residents of Russia-occupied populated areas. The goal of the research is to describe lingual means meant to express love for the land as the feature of Ukrainian mentality on the basis of the aforementioned material. The following assignments made it possible to reach the goal: to spot the dialectal material; to record the dialectal discourse with the help of phonetic transcription; to define lingual means aimed at representation of love for the land as one of the elements of Ukrainian mentality. A particular dialect speaker’s virtual speaking phonetics became the source of the research. In the presented fragment of the eastern steppe discourse, love for the land as a segment of Ukrainian mentality reveals itself as love for gardening. Growing agricultural crops (vegetable crops) is a hard spadework that needs great effort under certain climatic conditions, in particular in the droughty eastern steppe region. The research found such lingual means of expressing love for the land, the mental feature of the Ukrainians, as nomination of vegetable crops as a component of agricultural lexis; sentences containing verbal forms l’ub|l’u zan’i|matys’ (лʼуб|лʼу занʼі|матисʼ) and zan’i|maius’ (занʼі|майусʼ) along with the substantivized pronoun tsym (цим) and the adverb dav|no (даў|но), all this directly signaling about passion for what people are fond of doing; repetitions; sentences; verbal forms; verbalnominal word combinations; various constructions, etc. We can see the prospects of the research studios as the opportunity to further study archival records of dialectal speaking typical of representatives of the eastern steppe dialect landscape (unfortunately, it is impossible to go on spotting oral dialect speaking now due to the warfare and seizure of a part of Donetsk Region). Further dialectological regional research will promote comprehensive lingual portrayal of each Ukrainian region, in particular Donetsk Region.