Issues in lexical acquisition of the Ukrainian language

This study sheds light on the potential underlying problems in the development of general ideas about lexicon structure and content, and development of actual semantic lexicon for the Ukrainian language. Lexical acquisition is a crucial element in development of ontological semantics, which is a semantic theory applicable to the study of natural language and computer processing. Proper lexical acquisition of any language entails a very accurate and tedious effort. I offer a number of examples to explain that the Ukrainian language in its current stage is not yet ready to undergo the process of being acquired. At present, there appear to be many pitfalls the lexical acquirer may not be aware of trying to work with the language. This is due to a still unsolved language problem in Ukraine – a “young” country that has been independent for less than twenty years, and that, along with a very complicated history, has had a very complicated language life. Ukrainian has undergone changes on every level – from its phonology to grammar, from its word meaning to context usage. There are multiple reasons for such complication and hence there are multiple issues that should be solved before a well-grounded and proper lexicon can be developed. Typically, the lexical acquirer will have to: (a) decide how many senses for every word must be included into a lexical entry, for which he/she can read the definitions of every word sense in a dictionary and try to merge as many senses as possible, so that a minimum number of senses remains; (b) to describe the syntactic peculiarities of every sense of the word; (c) to describe the semantic features of every sense of the word by mapping it into an ontological concept and constraining if necessary the properties of this concept; (d) to link everything (that is syntax and semantics) together. There are basically two resources for capturing meaning: the speakers’ intuition and the human-oriented published dictionaries, representing meaning explicitly but known to be faulty and unreliable and, moreover, not containing sufficient amounts of information to allow for automatic capturing of word meaning from them. Both resources are very unreliable and untrustworthy in case of the Ukrainian language. There is a lot of confusion even among the Ukrainian linguists as to what is actually Ukrainian and what is not, to say nothing of the laypeople. The case with the dictionaries of different sorts is also quite tricky, and will be scrutinized in this work as well