OIKONYMY OF UKRAINE: A RETROSPECTIVE OF ONOMASTIC RESEARCHES

INTRODUCTION Oikonymy has occupied an important place in the system of human values. It belongs to the cultural heritage of the people and is the very universal historical and social fact that gives the right to interpret it as a peculiar phenomenon of culture. The contemporary Ukrainian multicultural space cannot be analysed or interpreted without this important link in the traditional culture 1 . Considering the formation and development of Ukrainian oikonymy, researchers focus their attention on the fact that part of oikonyms were formed from appellatives and geographical terms, many were preceded by microtoponyms, some settlements were named after hydronyms or other oikonyms, while others would not have occurred without anthroponyms and their direct or indirect participation in their forming; former cities lost their urban status and became villages or vice versa. However, no matter how the process of establishing the name of the settlement was made, they have the same linguistic and cultural load, because they are formed according to certain linguistic laws and explicate information of the relevant code of culture. It has already become the standard of understanding that oikonyms as one of toponyms type contain triune information: geographical, historical and linguistic: “A toponym does not exist without the named object, and the objects of the environment are studied by geography. The need for toponyms, their contents, changes is dictated by history, but only through language. A name is a word, a fact of language, not geography or history itself. But the fact is specific, and linguistic knowledge without special toponymic one is not enough to study it” 2 . This thought, said by Volodymyr Nikonov over fifty years ago, convinces us that in the nineteenth century started, and in the twentieth century on the basis of geography, history, ethnography and linguistics was built a “universe of scientific research” – onomastics. In the twenty first century they spoke of onomocentrism, in which onomastic researches are carried out in close