Lingual means of the denotation in the Ukrainian language for age development periods of a child in the first year of the life

Abstract

The names of age periods of the first year of a child’s life were considered in the paper. Traditionally the first year of a child’s life was not clearly divided into shorter stages, and in turn, there were no established names which would correlate with these age periods. In every-day life defining features for a child of the first year of life is the fact of birth itself, which fixes a noun-composite a newly-born, as well as expressive signs associated with feeding a baby and its (his/her) inability to speak, namely, such nouns as a nursling and a baby. A clearly differentiated division of a child’s age period, before reaching the age of one year, is recorded in medicine. Scientific observations of the physiological changes in the development of a child, depending on a lived calendar period, determined the classification of the life into certain stages beginning from the prenatal development; it was expressed in a special terminology, for example, a perinatal period, a zero day. In a medical sphere the division units of a life period before the age of one year are hours, days, months; thus, this temporal vocabulary belongs to the structure of terminological phrases used to denote a certain age stage, the gradation of periods can be done with help of adjectives-qualifiers early, late. In a pedagogical discourse, contrary to a medical sphere, the names of the age periods in a child’s life do not clearly correlate with physiological changes and a calendar duration, and in an every-day life discourse the correlation is seen the least. However a conversational speech is characterized with a larger number of the patterns which form the names of age periods, descriptive nominations, due to a child’s socialization. Thus, a set of nominative units is different for each discourse, but we can come across some scientific terms in mass media, and from there they can be found in a conversational speech. In a pedagogical, medical, every-day life discourse we have the cases when the same nouns are used, for instance, a newly-born, however they differ semantically.