Lexical variation in the language of the Ukrainian press of the 1920s-1940s and the development of a new lexical norm

The paper presents a comparative corpus-based research of the vocabulary in the Ukrainian newspapers of the interwar period and the first Post–World War II years. The research aims to show the ways in which a new lexical norm for journalism was formed in 1940s. The paper envisages this new norm with regard to the influence of the Western and the Eastern Ukrainian language standards and of the Russian influence as well. Three corpora of newspaper texts have been built that represent different variants of Standard Ukrainian: 1) the Soviet newspaper texts of 1919–1933 up to the end of the Ukrainization; 2) the Western Ukrainian pre-Soviet and ‟inter-Soviet” newspaper texts of 1937–1943; 3) the Western Ukrainian Soviet newspaper texts of 1939–1946. For each of these, frequency lists were built. Our conclusions are based on comparing these lists. We have built a table showing changes (including frequency changes) within 120 semantic fields of synonyms. Our research showed that the new lexical norm that was formed in the Soviet journalism of 1940s had an Eastern Ukrainian basis. The regional Western vocabulary attested in the pre-Soviet and ‟inter-Soviet” Western Ukrainian newspapers had almost no trace in the new lexical norm. Neither did the Western lexical units that remind the Russian ones (upadok ʽdecline', oba ʽboth' etc.), a fact showing that the growth of the Russian influence was implemented only with the support of the Eastern variant. Several changes are attested within the synonymous fields (more often they shrink) and changes in the frequency of different synonyms, more often favouring the cognates of Russian words, although some cases go against this tendency. The Ukrainian language as attested in the Soviet newspaper texts of the 1940s keeps the bulk of its lexical basis; the Russification trend is superficial and in many cases rather brief. As it is shown by comparing the vocabulary of these texts with the modern norm, many Russian borrowings of the 1930s and 1940s did not find their way into the standard language.