STRUCTURAL ORGANIZATION OF ANCIENT UKRAINIAN APHORISMS
Authors: Stankevych Nina 
Published: September 2022

The material of the research is aphorisms of Ukrainian writers and philosophers from the 11th to the beginning of the 19th century, which were collected and arranged by Valery Shevchuk in the book “Eternal Wisdom”. The author claims the value of works of this genre, the power of ancient Ukrainian philosophical thought, its European context.
The action of the aphorism as an independent semantic organism occurs in a combination of logically coherent syntactic construction and artistic and stylistic means. The methods of constructing ancient philosophical thought, the conciseness of verbal complexes, and the formation of structural models of aphorisms are of scientific interest.
An aphorism is a short judgment of a generalizing nature, which reflects the subjective vision of a certain fragment of reality, it has a philosophical meaning, figurative and artistic form, and aesthetic value. Characteristic features of aphorisms: brevity, depth of content, linguistic expressiveness, aesthetic perfection, originality, didactics.
The classification of aphorisms according to a structural criterion consists of correlating them with a simple sentence, a complex sentence, or a supra-phrase unity. The choice of a certain logical structure depends on the general semantic idea of ​​the aphorism, associated with the linguistic way of expressing the semantic or figurative dominant.
The most productive syntactic constructions among ancient aphorisms-simple sentences are models A = B. The semantic core of an aphoristic expression is most often in the postposition. These models are classical and constitute a figurative-associative reaction to a certain logical-philosophical, ethical, aesthetic concept. Stylistic means – homogeneous members of the sentence, the inversion of the members of the sentence
Among complex sentences productive models of comparison-opposition, they form short logical judgments, built on the structural scheme: A, and B. The most common complex sentences with a conditional relationship. These are mostly logical aphorisms, their clear structural organization is evidence of a connection with paremias.
Aphorisms of analytical construction are divided into two-component and multicomponent. Multicomponent supra-phrase units are complete philosophical microtexts. The aesthetic perfection of these structures is achieved by stylistic devices: construction according to the «question-answer» scheme, use of anaphora, decomposition of a certain linguistic concept into semantic components, etc.
Aphorisms based on the principle of classification are successful. They are logically slender, rational, accurate, the number of components provides a clear, complete structure. There are often two components (3, 4). Such aphorisms facilitate perception, are better remembered, are autosemantic.
The structural types of the analyzed aphoristic massif testify to the perfection of the form and the aesthetic value of ancient aphorisms as linguistic and cultural signs.
Key words: aphorism, syntactic strukture, composition, structural models, simple sentence, complex sentence, supra-phrase unity, artistic and figurative means.