Novye tendencii v standartnom ukrainskom jazyke: leksičeskaja divergencija iz russkogo jazyka i konvergencija k zapadnoslavjanskim jazykam (Новые тенденции в стандартном украинском языке: лексическая дивергенция из русского языка и конвергенция к западнославянским языкам)

In Standard Ukrainian one can notice the tendency to avoid lexical items and sometimes con-structions formally similar to Russian in favour of synonyms of West Slavic origin. Overall, this trend is also pertaining to Church Slavonicisms and items of East Slavic common stock. Most of the substituted lexemes penetrated Ukrainian as early as the 16th century, mainly through Polish and Czech, gradually replacing their Church Slavonic and East Slavic equivalents in the old literary Ukrainian language (“stara ukrajins’ka literaturna mova”). In the course of its history Ukrainian has known two opposite trends: one of convergence towards its old East Slavic origin, and the other of divergence, they often depended on extra linguistic factors. In this paper attention will be drawn to some recurrent lexemes that, from the lexical point of view, confirm the actual trend of divergence from Russian, approximating modern Standard Ukrainian to the West Slavonic languages