Comparative Study on Morphologically Motivated Lacunae (English-Ukrainian Language Pair)

The research undertaken addresses the untranslatability issue at word level in distantly-related languages. It investigates lacunary units lacking one-word correlates in the contrasted language due to structural properties viewed through the prism of their derivational categories (agentive, attributive, instrumental) in the English and Ukrainian languages. In the article, we hypothesize that lacunae constitute a special domain, which involves lexical units whose structural and content properties can be revealed by implementing a comparative analysis. We propose to analyze non-equivalent nouns with different morphological composition, suggest the ways of rendering their meaning in Ukrainian and discuss their textual realization during literary translation. Implementing J.P. Vinay and J. Darbelnet's concept of equivalence, the paper offers a contrastive analysis of referentially transparent and nontrans-parent lacunary units within derivational categories, signaling possible shifts in their morphological status, since lacunae usually represent complex language units undergoing structural and semantic transformations during translation. The research methodology assumes an integrated analysis combining comparative, structural and interpretation methods. In the first part, certain approaches to the lacunarity study are reviewed, then the interlingual correlates for the source language (hereafter-SL) are described with reference to their lexical-morphological properties. Next, the lexicographic approach is undertaken to identify the lacunae which constitute full or partial correlates in the target language (hereafter-TL). Acknowledging the asymmetry of conventional lexicographic representation, the study revealed predominance of lacunae's motivated derivational meanings. The material of substantive lacunary units of the English language analyzed in the investigation clearly suggests that their form is represented by both univerbs and specific words which actualize lacunae's lexico-grammatical properties, the morphological processes remaining productive. Constituting primarily full equivalents with different structural properties, the base derivatives in English at the interlanguage level are characterized by intensive abstraction and generalization of motivational traits. The contrastive study of English nouns and Ukrainian correlates proves that the relations of partial equivalence embrace the correlates characterized by the compositional uniformity of lexical meanings under the differences in their morphologic structure. The paper proves that the ethnolinguistic specificity might cause certain implications during literary translation. During translation derived substantives differ in word-formation models, hence one should distinguish between employing a paraphrase (group of lexemes) and substituting a word-combination by a word.

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