Representation of the Handicraft Vocabulary of the Sura Volga Region in a Thematic Dictionary: Prerequisites for Creation, Composition and Structure

In the article, the author discusses the ways of grouping and representing the handicraft vocabulary items of the Sura Volga region dialects in a thematic dictionary organized by the onomasiological principle. First of all, the author localizes the dialects in question and gives a brief description of their emergence paralleled with the history of the territory where they are present nowadays, that is of modern Penza and Ulyanovsk Oblasts, which were colonized by Russian-speaking settlers only a couple of centuries ago. The author concludes that these secondary idioms belong mostly to the Middle Russian group of dialects and share a lot of common features, which allows regarding them as a certain continuum liable to description as a whole. The author justifies the necessity of a dictionary containing the dialectal handicraft vocabulary of the Sura Volga region and claims that an accurate depiction of a certain thematic group of dialectal lexical items, such as handicraft terms, demands specific principles of organisation. These principles widely contradict the traditional alphabetic arrangement: for example, a coherent description of a bunch of words denoting related items (e.g. craftsman, his working place and result of work), or drawing of areal maps typically used in linguistic geography. Having analyzed the terms related to felting, carpentry and weaving, the author develops a special method of representing the relevant material both via linguistic data, such as phonetic variants, syntactic distribution and morphological peculiarities of each item, and encyclopaedic information on how each handicraft action or instrument contributes to the result and what this final result is for each type of the handicrafts under consideration. Thus, the author has chosen to divide the words related to each handicraft into seven subgroups such as ‘actor’, ‘instrument’, ‘result’, and so on, which shows the whole picture of what handicraft activities are like and why they need the terms they actually have. If one wants to look for a certain word, not a notion, an alphabetic index at the end of the book can be addressed, where each word is provided with the information on how it can be found in the main text of the dictionary. Finally, the author describes the principles of illustrative material selection. In general, the author hopes her project can prove useful for the description of Russian dialectal handicraft vocabulary.

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