K. P. MYKHALCHUK’S FIGURE IN THE HISTORY OF UKRAINIAN LINGUISTICS

Abstract

In the paper the author made an attempt to analyse the scientific heritage of a well-known Ukrainian public man of 1960s, a linguist dialectologist, a phonetician, an ethnographer, a full member of Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, a member of the South-West Section of Russian Geographical Society as well as Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv and the Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler. The article focuses in particular on the description of the scholar’s dialectological research and his achievements in the field of historical phonetics. The paper contains a brief review of K.P. Mykhalchuk’s works on historical morphology and general linguistic methodology.
The aim of the article is to outline K.P. Mykhalchuk’s contribution to the history of Ukrainian linguistics in general as well as to historical linguistics and dialectology in particular.
To achieve the aim the following tasks should be completed: to give a linguistic description of K.P. Mykhalchuk’s scientific heritage; to find out about his role in the history of Ukrainian linguistics formation and development; to analyse certain linguistic views of the scientist; to describe his public activity.
The researcher studied dialectology in close connection with the history of language. He claimed that only the understanding of dialectological phenomena helped to objectively learn the history of particular phonetic and morphological processes.
K.P. Mykhalchuk investigated not only the issues of phonetics and morphology but also the problems of linguistic methodology. He paid special attention to the general theoretical questions of language nature and functioning. As did the followers of naturalistic trend, the researcher defined linguistics as a natural science. He thought that language differentiation showed the rules of natural society development. At the same time, the scientist claimed that the language integration can happen only as a result of political abuse.
The scholar is famous not only by his scientific research but also by his sense of nationhood. His life is a battle for the defense of Ukrainian word, without it he could not imagine the future of Ukraine in the world. Having realized that a language is a part of ethnic identification and culture, the great patriot insisted that the language reflects the nation’s psychology, it is a bearer of ancient mental and moral heritage of a nation.
The scientist created meaningful examples of publicistic works, which confirmed his conscious sense of nationhood. K.P. Mykhalchuk always stood up for his own views on science and fought against pseudo-science. These actions promoted further objective development of linguistics. His scientific heritage found its niche in the field of Ukrainian philology and it needs to be further developed in the aspects of historical phonetics with its close relations to dialectology. It gives adequate examples of objective science to the future generations of linguists and native word’s experts.