On the dictionary of the Old Believer language personality of Agafya Karpovna Lykova

The thought about the priority of individual language acquires increasingly more supporters. Typical and untypical language personalities are studied by linguists. The author studies the brightest example of an untypical language personality, the Old Believer Agafya Karpovn Lykova, the only living representative of the family of recluses that lived in the Sayan taiga for several decades. The formation and functioning of the language personality of the Old Believer is caused by extralinguistic factors connected with the belonging to the Old Believer confession, the family living in reclusion, the new conditions for the dialect functioning due to frequent contacts with representatives of society, the individual language ability. A noticeable contribution to the study of the language of the Old Believer is The Dictionary of Agafya Lykova's Language. The sources of the lexicographical processing were 99 letters that the language personality wrote in the period from 1983 to 2003. The purpose of The Dictionary of Agafya Lykova's Language is the reflection of the vocabulary of the concrete personality which was formed under the local conditions in the absence of fixed contacts with major Russian language speakers. The basic tasks of the dictionary are 1) to present the lexical composition of the idiolect of the language personality; 2) to interpret it lexicographically through the system of lexical marks; 3) to designate the number of uses of individual words; 4) to reveal the specific character of the vocabulary through the comparison with the data of the dictionaries of the Russian language. According to its type the dictionary is complete (since it includes the entire vocabulary of Lykova's letters); it belongs to dialect dictionaries of a language personality (it presents the vocabulary of the Old Believer dialect of the southern regions of Yenisei Siberia), to explanatory-translation (it assumes intralingual translation) and lexical-onomastic (it includes proper names: anthroponyms and toponyms from the letters and records). The vocabulary of Agafya Lykova, reflected in the written texts, is represented in the alphabetical order in the form of 2977 entries. The structure of the entry includes four zones: a zone of representation, a zone of qualification, an illustrative zone and a comparative zone. 1) The zone of representation begins from the title word in the initial form, then word forms are given that exist in the texts. 2) The zone of qualification presents linguistic information about the word by the use of lexical marks. 3) The illustrative zone presents examples of the use of words in the context with the indication of the source. At the end of the illustrative zone the number of word uses is given. 4) The comparative zone uses data of 27 dictionaries (explanatory, general dialect, local dialect, toponymic, theological, historical, of obsolete words, of phrases and idioms). The basic dictionary in this case is The Dictionary of the Russian language (Moscow, 1981-1984). Each word of the Lykova's language dictionary is verified in this edition to attribute it to classes of lexical units. As the data of The Dictionary of Agafya Lykova's Language show, the lexical system of the idiolect consists of the following components: 1) all-Russian vocabulary; 2) dialect vocabulary of the old-resident population of the southern regions of Krasnoyarsk Krai which originated as a result of the mixing of the North-Russian and South-Russian dialects; 3) sacral liturgical vocabulary; 4) family and occasional vocabulary. The practical significance of The Dictionary of Agafya Lykova's Language consists in the fact that unique materials are assembled, systematized, lexicographically processed, represented in the dictionary and introduced into the scientific use: letters of the Old Believer recluse, the language personality which was formed in a micro-society and preserved special features of the development of the Russian language of different epochs.

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