Motherhood as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon

Abstract

The article investigates the motherhood phenomenon in terms of linguistics. This paper focuses on the clarifying its sociocultural characteristics within Ukrainian communicative space. While this research it has been determined that the motherhood signs verbalized by idiomatic expressions and related to the mother archetype are associated with such notions as care, compassion, kindness, care, support etc. Mother image within the Ukrainian tradition gets a significant emotional and expressive semantics in its modifications as mother, mum, mammy. This research defines the set of idioms that express established Ukrainian stereotypical views about pregnant women, giving birth to a child, children’s feeding, bringing them up etc. in Ukrainian culture. The main attention is drawn to the statements containing the central lexical component “mother”, outlining their diverse semantic potential. This paper determines that the social and biological experience of being a mother recorded mostly in set idioms expressions and idioms relevant within individual dialects. Such idioms have euphemistic nature and are identified by comparing the relevant events in the lives of women and society with nominations, which in the context of the Ukrainian cultural tradition are manifested as a form of the communicative compromise. Mentioned idioms demonstrate the desire to avoid direct nominations of pregnancy process and pregnancy itself, inability to become pregnant, unwanted pregnancy and childbirth etc. The reason causing such transformations is connected with the desire to avoid communicative conflict or distract attention from a woman in order not to curse or hurt her. Thus, the nomination of a pregnant woman due to special attitude, public opinion influence (condemnation, contempt, approval, admiration) gets different modifications.