Autobiographical practices in the context of Siberian verbal culture

The article describes the features of the speech genre of autobiography functioning in written formal and oral informal communication. The material of the research is 300 clerical autobiographies written by residents of Tomsk in the 1920s-1990s, and 140 oral autobiographical stories recorded on the territory of Tomsk Oblast from Siberian old residents from 1940 to 2008. The studied autobiographical practices form autobiographical discourse and their comparison, in the author's opinion, allows describing features of this discourse. For this purpose the author analysed the material taking into account the following characteristics: purpose, functions, use, discourse participants, genre and composition, space and time, subjective and objective basis, concepts forming autobiographical discourse, communicative strategies and tactics, linguistic means. The analysis of the material has shown that the investigated autobiographical practices have common and specific features. The differences are manifested in the functions of these texts, situations of their use, participants of communication, genre and composition characteristics, linguistic means. The purpose of authors of all texts is to tell us about themselves and their life. All texts are provoked: clerical autobiographies are written when people apply for jobs, enter the university, and dialect autobiographical stories appear as a reaction of the informants to the dialectologist's request to tell about their life. Texts perform informational, communicative, social, cultural, didactic functions, serve as historical sources, ways of self-identification, self-presentation. Communicative, cultural, didactic functions are more expressed in dialectal autobiographical stories, and social function in clerical autobiographies. The texts belong to the speech genre of autobiography which has genre variants, such as clerical autobiography or autobiographical story, depending on the sphere of functioning. The main participant of communication in this type of discourse is the author of an autobiography. The addressee of a clerical autobiography is unknown to the author. Oral autobiographical stories are recorded in the situation of communication between a dialectologist and an informant. A feature of the autobiographical texts is the chronological sequence of events, which corresponds to the trajectory of human life, but violation of it is possible in oral autobiographical stories. The main communicative strategies which authors use during the creation of autobiographical texts are self-presentation and omission. Basic concepts forming autobiographical discourse are "life", "family", "work", "time", "space" and, in particular, the concept "Siberia". Clerical autobiographies are created with officialese in an official style and autobiographical stories in a conversational style. The latter are characterised by the use of structures with direct and someone else's speech.

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