Vidonims as a means of giving a negative assessment to newspaper texts

Abstract

The article examines the use in the language of modern Ukrainian periodicals vidonim words to provide texts with expressive and emotional coloration, which, however, often have negative marking. The appearance in newspapers of such lexical units indicates the intensification of the print media development and the need to inform about news from different fields of life, politics, culture. It was found that the largest group of vidonims make derivatives from anthroponyms, in particular from surnames. It was found that this is due to a number of extralinguistic factors including some political processes in the country. Vidonims had been classified by the method of creation and the area of use. It was discovered that the appearance of vidonim units was caused by a desire of speakers to name figuratively this or that phenomenon, effect, transfer meaning shades or expression, to express which in Ukrainian literary language there are no special tools. The study found that the beginning of the XXI-st century is characterized by the active use of vidonim units for negative characteristic of people, processes and conditions that take place in the life of the country.  Mainly they are using for political texts, sometimes in the texts on military topics.