Modeling of axiologically marked meanings of toponyms and their derivatives in Ukrainian linguistic culture: manifestation of the macroextralingual factor ‘war’

Abstract

The paper presents the changes taking place in the Ukrainian linguistic culture under the influence of an extralinguistic macrofactor, related to “Russian world” propaganda and the hybrid Russia‑Ukraine war, including the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
The research under consideration focuses on the transformation taking place in the Ukrainian toponymic language worldview in the sphere of the national language culture. The authors in particular discuss renaming Ukrainian toponyms that arose under Russian ideological influence in the Soviet period, presenting Russian-language nominations, distorting the national linguistic consciousness as well as the functioning of quasi‑toponyms, called pseudo-republics, which appeared as a result of Ukraine’ territories having been occupied by Russian troops.
Also focused on in the paper are the issues of Russian’ modeling of offensive paraphrases for nominating the choronym Ukraine, and the Ukrainian language opposition verbalization, which is designed to create axiologically-marked horonym Russia paraphrases, in particular, spelling it with a lowercase letter that aims at manifesting the axiological-orthographic norm expressing contempt, irony, etc. Modeling of new pragmatics within Ukrainian astionyms, which is connected, on the one hand, with the occupation consequences, Russian aggression (these are victim cities), and on the other hand — hero cities glorification that have acquired the status of the invincible: pragmatic meanings are modeled on the secondary nomination basis, metaphorization, language game techniques, the precedent phenomenon, associative reactions and reflections. Each connoted nomination has a transparent internal form that can be deciphered, presenting mainly generalizing and evaluative meaning, new symbols, images, pragmatic ambiguity. The toponym is considered as a clearly axiological marker of the environment.
Relying upon the research results one can trace the great word-forming potential of toponyms, as they become productive creative bases for toponymic formations. The paper expands the linguoaxiology theory, in particular evaluation grammar, since it is about creating the models of axiological-grammatical meanings. The presented material complements the creative onomastics theory and practice, in particular creative toponymy, as well as political toponymy.
The Russia-Ukraine war has caused a new burst of Ukrainians’ linguistic creativity regarding word-forming and pragmatic metamorphoses in the toponyms system manifesting the opposition native, own — foreign, strange, hostile. The analyzed material can be used for compiling dictionaries of connotative toponyms.