Ecological informativeness of English phytonyms with the ornithological component

The study aims to reveal biological and ecological information contained in English phytonyms with the ornithological component with further popularization of their ecological meanings, which helps the formation of environmental consciousness based on ecological culture. The article provides a compilation of data on the interpretation and application of the terms “phytonym” and “floronym” in linguistic research; besides, the distinction of the given terms on the basis of biological data is proposed. The research is novel in that it concretizes the notion of ecological informativeness in relation to a lexical unit of any complexity and demonstrates the ecological information extracted from ornithomorphic phytonyms. As a result of the study, it was established that ecological informativeness of a lexical unit is connected with its ability to transmit the accumulated knowledge about natural world. Plant and bird names are united by the tree main groups of associations: the similarity of the external species features, overlapping in a bird’s diet and a plant’s property of edibility/inedibility, coincidence of a bird’s arrival in the distribution area and a plant’s flowering. The revealed associations can indicate that animal and plant worlds go parallel to each other and the result of this parallelism, ornithomorphic phytonyms, shows human ability to integrate into both the worlds in the process of investigation and comparison of natural realities.