OKSANA BAS-KONONENKO’S SATIRICAL PHONETICS AND «COMBAT» ETYMOLOGY AS A HYBRID GENRE OF UKRAINIAN LINGUISTIC DISCOURSE.

The subject matter of this article is O.V. Bas-Kononenko’s satirical microtexts, first posted on Facebook within the framework of her Internet project #МоваЗброяФонетикаПриціл, and then collected and published as an eponymous book. The author discusses the semantic-communicative, structural, functional, and historical-typological characteristics of the innovative hybrid genre of linguistic discourse manifested by these microtexts, which Bas-Kononenko created as a specific form of creative philological response to the full-scale Russian aggression. As a manifestation of linguistic self-defence (in terms of A. Wierzbicka’s theory), Bas-Kononenkoʼs satirical phonetics presents the Great War as the Ukrainian vs. Russian language opposition and confrontation as well as that of the linguistic competencies of the Ukrainians and the Russians. It does so by establishing paronymic interlingual relations, which it then interprets, by means of word-play within the framework of the author’s «combat» etymology. As a result of this quasi-etymological treatment, the world pictures that inhere in both of these languages are construed as the opposition of «world» vs. «anti-world». In particular, the grotesque and ludicrous interpretation of the phonetic and inner form of Ukrainian linguistic items by the Russians as depicted by her appears to the reader as a natural consequence of their paranoid denial of the Ukrainian language. Also stylistically effective is her satirical presentation of Russian pronunciation by the Ukrainian alphabet. The suggestiveness of the models of satirical representation employed by the author is based on the innate orientation of the human psyche to the iconic perception of the relationship of signifiant and signifié within the linguistic sign. From a historical and typological viewpoint, the hybrid discursive genre created by Bas-Kononenko shows an affinity with the traditions of the Baroque and at the same time with postmodernistic poetics.