LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THROUGH SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES AND VOCABULARY UNITS (BASED ON THE UKRAINIAN FOLK TALE ‘RUKAVYCHKA’)

Based on the Ukrainian folk tale ‘Rukavychka’, this paper seeks to highlight how the basic syntactic structures are introduced to young children acquiring Ukrainian as their first language. The findings of the paper allow to maintain that Ukrainian in the folk tale is exposed in a variety of recurrent syntactic structures, which are specific parameters featuring the Ukrainian language. These are: 1) the structure with the null Subject and null Verb + Complement ØS ØV С; 2) the inverted word order in an unextended simple sentence VS(A); 3) the inversion of an extended simple sentence VSOA, 4) the pleonastic, materially identical subject SSAV. These structures are repeatedly used throughout the folk tale and are intensively supported by lexical cohesive ties (either materially identical units or hyponyms of topically related words). The word classes in use of the folk tale are semantically compliant with Morris Swadesh list: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions of place. The verbs are monosemantic denoting movement (ішов, бігла, уліз), state (жити, бути, пустити). Notably, the folk tale does not contain adjectives or adverbs which require the child’s abstract thinking or some operations like comparison or evaluative judgement of actions, emotions, states. Onomatopoeic words (шкряботушка, скрекотушка, гав-гав, хро-хро-хро, гу-гу-гу) are also used.