Metalanguage Reflexion in the Text Culture of the Russian Germans: Variation of Forms and Meanings

This article is devoted to the language of the Russian Germans - a subethnos embraced by the processes of linguistic and cultural shifts. The work was carried out in line with perceptual dialectology - a linguistic direction that combines the achievements of traditional dialectology and "naive" linguistics. It also implements the approaches of discursive and field linguistics. The research focuses on the system of metalanguage representations of the Russian Germans, reflected in the folklore discourse of the named community. Based on the analysis of German dialectal precedent texts, a picture of the forms of realization of metalanguage reflection in them can be seen, the phenomena of linguistic reality that form the object of this reflection are revealed. During the field work, 123 people of German nationality living in different districts of Tomsk region were interviewed, a corpus of folklore texts, mainly of comic discourse, was collected. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the implementation of metalanguage reflection in Russian-German folklore discourse has a multilevel nature - it can take convoluted, implicit, or vivid, explicit forms. Most of the dialectal texts recorded in the field do not convey detailed reflections about language and do not contain markers of metalanguage reflection - words and phrases that objectify the facts of language or speech. However, it is precisely the meaningful, attentive attitude of the collective consciousness to linguistic reality that lays the creative basis for the generation of this type of text. Implicit metalanguage structures function in the texts of this category as necessary elements of their semantic structure. They ensure the achievement of a general suggestive effect, putting on the form of stylistic devices necessary for this, based mainly on playing with the meanings and sound shapes of dialect words. In turn, knowledge about the language, explicitly realized in the folklore text, forms its central semantic units. Around the phenomena of linguistic reality, realized and reflected in the text, the plot of a folklore work is directly built, and metalanguage representations in the plot-forming function are marked with lexical units denoting language / speech. Such phenomena that are perceived and receive theming include code switching caused by the bilingualism of the Russian Germans, changes in the vocabulary of the native language due to the transformation of the social conditions of its existence, formal and semantic features of words, gender characteristics of speech, language norm, etc. As a result of the study, it was established that in the light of perceptual dialectology, folklore texts should be interpreted as a "precedent" mirror, which not only reflects and consolidates the linguistic phenomena most salient for the collective consciousness of the studied dialectal community, but also accumulates the cultural and historical context of these phenomena that is relevant for this community. Thus, the methodological approach proposed in the work can be used in the future to build a reflexive model of language that would combine the profane, everyday one with the general historical, general cultural one.

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