Ill Wishes in Russian Dialect Dictionaries: Issues of Lexicographic Interpretation

2017

Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки, Vol 19, Iss 4(169), Pp 9-21 (2017)

This article considers issues of field collection and lexicographic interpretation of a number of words, which can be found in Russian ill wishes, such as imprecations, threats, and invectives. There are some differences in how dialect dictionaries define ill wishes, and represent their variants, as well as in singling out of the main word, defining grammar characteristics of ill wishes elements, etc. But the main difficulty that can make the data of dialect dictionaries unreliable is that there are “phantom” words and, more importantly, “phantom” meanings of these words. Sometimes authors of dictionaries involuntarily demonise the characters acting in ill wishes: lexemes denoting agents are given alien mythological semantics (Vyatka Region — нóготь ‘dill’, Kursk Region — осáд ‘house spirit’, Novgorod Region — касть ‘dillry’, тур ‘dill’, etc.). Such mistakes can originate while gathering material, when there are few fixations. This prevents researchers from seeing the ways of compression obscuring the form of imprecations. Besides, in some cases, such mistakes arise in the course of further lexicographic interpretation. The authors of dictionaries do not have full information about the functioning and the semantics of a word, and, consequently, they rush to conclusions “taking it out” of an idiom in which the word exists, and attribute a systemic linguistic status to it, “mythologising” its denotation (which may not exist at all).

article

Russian

Ural Federal University Press, 2017.

русские народные говоры, диалектная лексикография, «фантомные» слова, злопожелания, инвективы, семантико-мотивационная реконструкция., History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature