The main trends in the word-formative adaptation of the latest borrowings to denote actions and states in the Ukrainian literary language of the 21 st century
Authors: Kutsak Hanna ,   National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Published: July 2024

At the beginning of the 21 st century, especially in its second decade, foreign units were entering to the journalistic and scientific Ukrainian language so rapidly that linguists sometimes did not have time for objective reasons to evaluate their “quality” and the appropriateness of their use. The activation of borrowings caused a certain disorder: adaptation to the grammatical system of the Ukrainian language occurs unevenly, often with hesitation in word-formative adaptation. A significant number of new adapted borrowed lexemes are not yet in normative, general or industry dictionaries. The most verb lexemes appeared primarily in the field of information technology, quite a few verb lexemes appeared in the field of business, finance, psychology, cosmetology etc. Lexemes of the foreign languages (mostly from English, less often from German, French, Italian or other languages) such as verbs and nouns were adapted in Ukrainian using verb suffixes -ува-, -изува-/-ізува-. The dynamic entry of such words into modern Ukrainian has caused a multi- tude of ways of them adaptation. It is often difficult to determine whether a verb in the Ukrai- nian language has been formed from a foreign verb or noun. This indicates the ambiguous word-formation adaptation of the analyzed verbs. The verb suffix -и- also proved to be productive in adaptation of the new borrowings. The verbs formed with it have common root corre- lates among foreign verbs and nouns. We observe hesitation in the word-formative adaptation of some verbs. It is indicates by the availability of common root variants with suffixes -ува– and -и-. Derivatives that have replenished the stock of reflexive verbs have been formed from some of the analyzed lexemes either with the help of the postfix -ся, or this postfix and the suffix -и-. Among the prefixes which found in borrowed verb lexemes, the prefix ре- is regularly used and the prefix де- is somewhat less used. In enriching the lexicon of the Ukrainian language with borrowings, there are many cases of simultaneous adaptation to modern Ukrainian of related verb structures: with a prefix and without it. Sometimes it is difficult to establish the direction of derivation. Common root lexemes could have entered modern Ukrainian directly from English or another language with a prefix or have been formed with a prefix from verbs adapted in a suffixal way. The second stage of word-formative adaptation of borrowings shows that derivatives have been formed from many verb bases adapted in modern Ukrainian using proper Ukrainian productive word-forming prefixes зà-, з-(с-), нà-, роз-, по-, про-, пере-, which express the word-formative semantics usual for them. Unmotivated, groundless oversaturation of modern Ukrainian literary language with borrowed lexemes, word-formative formants, etc., uncontrolled using of such units lead to the leveling of national features of the Ukrainian language. This problem prompts a rethinking of ways to replenish the terminological systems of various branches of science with new borrowed language units and this problem prompts to a more critical usage of criteria for adaptation of foreign lexemes. Keywords: borrowings to denote actions and states, word-formative adaptation, proper Ukrainian word-forming verb suffixes, proper Ukrainian word-forming verb prefixes, foreign languages bases.