The basic trends and perspectives for the development of military vocabulary in modern ukrainian-language mass media.
Authors:   Державний податковий університет, Sukalenko Tetiana , Ladynyak Nataliia ,   Kamianets- Podilskyi Ivan Ohiienko National Universiti
Published: April 2024

The article deals with identifying and characterizing of the main trends and pros-pects for the development of military vocabulary in modern mass media.A review of the Ukrainian scientists’ works on the study of the professional vocabu-lary of military personnel, military terminology, etc. was carried out. Attention is focused on the fact that linguists use the concepts of «military discourse» and «war discourse».In the modern realities of the language space of Ukrainians, linguists distinguish two types of military discourse – formal and informal.The concept of war discourse is more comprehensive in terms of verbal and non-verbal means of expression. The work emphasizes that the communicative situation of war discourse is specifi c and may be limited in time, since with the end of hostilities, part of the vocabulary may fall out of use due to the lack of need to nominate events, phenomena and objects related to the war.With the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the dictionary of military lexicon was replenished with both new lexemes and those that have already existed before, but now have acquired diff erent meanings.With the beginning of the large-scale Russian invasion, the tendency to write proper names, associated with the aggressor country, with a lowercase letter spread: Russia/russia, Moscow/moscow, RF/rf, Putin/putin:The lexeme «occupiers» acquired a new sound – these are those who participate in the occupation; the invaders.Previously, the lexeme «occupiers» was used to denote the German invaders dur-ing the Second World War. The lexeme «racism», which has a bright negative con-notation, also appeared, consonant with the word «fascism».The lexeme «orcs» («russian invaders», «russian military») has entered the mili-tary vocabulary, which is modifi ed by a new semantic load, as we fi x it on the pages of J.R. Tolkien’s works, who named the army of evil mythical creatures as such.The reality of the war is refl ected in the expansion of the meanings of words that appear in news releases, live communication of Ukrainians: cotton, hail, stretching, etc.A separate group of lexical innovations in the military discourse are the names of weapons: «Bayraktar», «Javelin», «NLAW», PFM-1 (anti-personnel high-explosive mine) «Petal», which are characterized by a high frequency of use.Another group consists of verbs formed from proper names: anthroponyms, topo-nyms, and the like: bayraktaryty, enloity, javelinity, stingerity, haimarsyty, kadyryty, macronyty, ukraiinyty, chornobaiity.Military slang is spreading in everyday use: digit, pixel (color of military cloth-ing), pokemon, fl ies, oars (types of weapons), etc.In the media space, we observe gender symmetry in relation to men and women who serve in the Armed Forces. Gender-marked vocabulary is characterized by a pos-itive connotation for both sexes. At the same time, we observe gender balance in the language of mass media and in relation to representatives of enemy forces but these are with the negative connotation.The vocabulary of the military is replenished both with new words, especially regarding the names of weapons, and by the acquisition of new meanings by lexemes. The second way concerns the words used to designate the participants in the confl ict. It is also productive to replenish the lexical system due to word formation, especially the nominative, which proves not so much the signifi cance of processes and actions, but rather the direct nomination of phenomena. We consider it promising to study the changes in the structure of the concept of «War» both during the last century and, in fact, from 2014 until now