SEMANTIC BASIS OF ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN ASTRONOMY TERMS

INTRODUCTION In modern linguistics the study of languages in contrastive aspect provides understanding the laws of development of human language, “being the most important means of formation and existence of human knowledge of objective reality” 1 . Contrastive investigation of languages proved to be extremely captivating as far as “different languages are not different designations of the same subject, but different visions of it” 2 . Considering rapid development of science and technology in contemporary world, it becomes quite obvious that the problems of contrastive studies of terminological systems of different languages are becoming increasingly relevant both in theoretical and applied aspects. The investigation of structural-semantic peculiarities of terminologies of different language systems appears especially valuable in this respect. The research of the mechanism of transformation of a common language meaning into terminological is a scientific task, the essence of which lies in the analysis of deep processes, that are going on in the semantic structure of a word. From the point of view of relationship between the level of development of terminological systems and scientific and technical progress, linguists quite naturally concentrate their attention on the linguistic background of already existing terminological systems. In the present paper the main semantic features of English and Ukrainian terms of astronomy as both elements of common language system and words in special function denoting scientific notions are investigated. The scientific relevance of the research is predetermined by