The Russian folklore word as reflected in dictionaries (concerning the lexicographic experience of linguofolklorists from Kursk)

The article describes the lexicographic experience of linguofolklorists working on folklore language dictionaries compilation. The Russian folklore is distinguished by the complexity of genre composition, geographic diversity and abundance of materials, which determines the approaches of linguists to lexicographic description of the folk song language. We often hear about the creation of a system and a series of folklore language dictionaries which have certain principles. Since there had been no tradition in folklore lexicography the following tactics was adopted. Firstly, linguofolklorists focused on compiling register dictionaries of two types: alphabetic and frequency dictionaries. The researchers from Kursk have compiled approximately 30 alphabetic-frequency dictionaries of different folklore genres. Later these dictionaries gave way to creating concordances - alphabetic listings of all the words from the text under analysis including the contexts of their usage. In addition to the traditional concordance form (the entry consists of the core word, statistic data and contexts with passportization), researchers from Kursk have tested the form of the concentrated concordance which is a sort of “essence” of the illustrative material. In this case, we observe an entry with one demonstrative context; the syntagmatic, paradigmatic and poetic device links of the analyzed lexeme are presented by means of specially adopted symbols. The experience with traditional and concentrated concordances led to the development of the one-word-concordance. This experiment required a special choice of the initial nomination. The choice fell on the noun “stove” due to its high symbolic importance for every house. The one-word-concordance presumably may comprise materials of different folklore genres; thus, researchers from Kursk took the texts of bylinas and non-ritual lyrics as well as ballads and historical songs (these sources combine both epic and lyrical moods) as the basis of their pilot project. Cross-cultural language studies have become a high priority trend of modern research. The contrastive dictionary of folklore language has become an original idea. This dictionary consists of entries which are double lexicographic units comprising equivalent nominations, which enables researchers to see common and specific traits in language representation of a certain fragment of the picture of the world in different cultures. The conclusion focuses on the significance and scientific reliability of dictionaries of different kinds in the study and comprehensive description of folklore.

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