The Project of a Contrastive Dictionary of the Kuban Cossacks’ Folk Songs

The aim of the article is to justify the concept of a contrastive dictionary of the language of Kuban Cossacks’ folk song culture. This dictionary should demonstrate the bilingual nature of the Kuban Cossacks’ song folklore in the context of Russian and Ukrainian folk speech traditions, and become the basis for identifying the ethnolinguistic and ethnopsychological features of the Kuban Cossacks - a subethnos that has formed its own special traditional culture for over three centuries. The contrastive analysis of each culturally significant lexeme is organized in two blocks depending on the research base: Russian-language songs (songs of the Kuban Line Cossacks and Russian folk songs), Ukrainian-language songs (songs of the Kuban Black Sea Cossacks and Ukrainian folk songs). The article presents the concept of contrastive dictionary of the Kuban Cossacks’ folk songs; its originality is determined by the peculiar forming conditions of the Kuban folklore language caused by the settlement history of the Kuban territory. The existing experience of compiling contrastive dictionaries cannot be fully applied to the language of Kuban folklore, in which Russian and Ukrainian language folk traditions are mixed in a complex way. The dictionary is based on the ideographic principle. The thematic approach fully reflects a particular fragment of the linguistic world-image and provides great opportunities to study the place of separate language units in this fragment. Due to the significance of the task, attention is focused on one thematic group - “Man’s World”. The structure of the dictionary entry of the developed dictionary reflects linguistic features of lexemes: it gives an idea of the lexical and morphological paradigmatics, family of words (within the analyzed lexicon), their co-occurrence properties (syntagmatic aspect), and the originality of use (functional aspect). Such a structure of the dictionary entry allows not only describing the linguistic features of the analyzed lexeme, noting the presence of qualitative (cultural, conceptual) asymmetry in equivalent lexemes, but also identifying the deep implicit meanings reflected in the co-occurrence properties of the word and understanding the concept verbalized by the analyzed lexeme. The justified concept of the contrastive dictionary of Kuban folk songs should contribute to the solution of many problems of modern lexicography - studies of the possibilities of using contrastive dictionaries in folklore and author’s (writer’s) lexicography, lexicography of a multicultural region.

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