Transformation of Modern Ukrainian Literary Language in the Aspect of the Preposition System

Abstract

The article investigates the peculiarities of the prepositions use in the works of Ukrainian poets in the 20-60s of the XIX century. The language of works of different periods has its peculiarities, which are objectively due to various factors, including historical events, the influence of foreign culture, the state of the literary process in the country, literature traditions and so on. Literature texts provide an opportunity to trace how prepositions functioned in the poetry of the XIX century and compare with modern trends, to identify similarities and differences of grammatical and semantic meanings. The texts by Levko Borovikovsky, Opanas Shpyhovsky, Ambrose Metlynsky, Mykola Kostomarov, Oleksandr Afanasyev-Chuzhbynsky, Viktor Zabila, Mykhailo Petrenko, and Oleksandr Korsun were selected for analysis. The purpose of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the use of prepositions in the poetic language of this period. A selection of examples of the prepositions use from the works of Ukrainian poets allows us to trace the dynamics of their use. The study identified the most commonly used prepositions and traced the functions and features of grammatical connections on the example of individual units. The use of archaic prepositions (к, об, од) is recorded. The construction of the dative case of a noun with the preposition “к” was widely used in ancient Ukrainian dialects. In modern literary language, this preposition is preserved in phraseology. Instead, the construction with the preposition “до” and the noun in the genitive case is actively used. Differences in the use of prepositions in the analyzed texts and modern language are revealed. The preposition “об” is now more actively used to denote temporal relations rather than object relations, although in the past it represented object relations quite widely. The use of parallel constructions (к – до, край – під – у, поміж – помеж), phonetic variants of prepositions (з – із – зо – ізо), prepositions that are stylistic synonyms (повз, поуз, проз) is traced. The revealed changes of grammatical and semantic meanings of prepositions, displacement of archaic constructions testify to the processes of language transformation and its constant development.