The Dialect Dictionary as a Kind of Supertext

This article presents a hypothesis according to which the dialect dictionary, which combines the attributes of explanatory and encyclopedic dictionaries, is qualified as a supertext of a special type. The problem is examined on the basis of the following lexicographic source: Slovar' russkikh starozhil'cheskikh govorovyuga Tyumenskoy oblas-ti: v 2 t. [Dictionary of Russian old-timer dialects of the south of Tyumen Oblast: in 2 vols] [11]. The analysis of the dictionary integrity is based on the concept of "super-text", existing in the Russian science in its literary and linguistic interpretation. The presented analysis of the dialect lexicographic work has allowed to come to the following conclusions. This dictionary, as well as ones similar to it, can be qualified as a special supertext. It consists of the same-type texts (dictionary entries), it has a coherence (integrity) with a spatial and temporal dimension. The dictionary reflects the generalized personality of the dialect speaker with his/her moral attitudes and life values and at the same time it has a cross-personality. The interpretation of the dialect vocabulary as a supertext gives the opportunity to come to a conclusion about the worldview categories of the generalized speaker of the studied dialect. Some of the categories are passeism, non-agentivity, special aspects of personal space reflection, the communicative "modesty tactics" which reflects naive fatalism and a tendency not to blend in, stereotyped behavior, accuracy and detailed description of the object in the case of verbal communication. In such texts, both thematic and modal commonness is manifested, allowing to combine them into "quasi-texts" in order to describe their modality more accurately. In this case, the degree of the coherence is not as high as that of other types of supertexts. Another specificity of this kind of supertext is the communicative framework peculiarity, i.e. reflecting the positions of the collective addresser and addressee, the dual nature of the former. Under these circumstances, the compilers of the dictionary and the addressee definitely perceive the text as something integral. This is a conditionally closed supertext with a significant degree of structural certainty, in spite of the fact that its components are not texts, but textoids. However, their systemic qualities allow to see the model of a whole in them - the dictionary supertext. Both formal and substantive criteria provide a basis for classifying the dictionary as a class of supertexts taking into account its specifics. Further consideration of the dialect dictionary as a supertext implies its ideographic interpretation.

Keywords

Authors

References