Principles and methods of lexicographic presentation of the lexico-semantic system of colloquial Russian of the 16th-17th centuries

Russian of the 16th-17th centuries receives lexicographic description in a number of dictionaries: academic Dictionary of Russian of the 11th-17th Centuries, regional historical dictionaries, historical terminological dictionaries. The Dictionary of Quotidian Russian of Muscovite Russia of the 16th-17th Centuries (QRD), created by authors from St. Petersburg State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences is a multi-volume explanatory dictionary of a group of texts of colloquial and business Russian of the 16th-17th centuries. The idea of this dictionary belongs to B.A. Larin according to whom this dictionary had to reflect the process of formation of national everyday conversation which further becomes one of the essential components of vocabulary of the literary language of a national era. QRD is created in compliance with the leading principles of Larin's lexicographic school: principles of completeness, historicism, semantism, improvement of methods of lexicographic description. The principle of completeness is realized in the completeness of vocabulary, abundance of illustrations, completeness of information provided about the word (grammatical, semantic and stylistic characteristics, information about the rate and prevalence of a lexeme, if necessary - etymological reference and an extralinguistic commentary). In compliance with the principle of semantism, QRD shows various meanings, shades of meanings, uses, cases of special functioning of words in detail. The principle of continuous improvement of lexicographic receptions assumes permanent research work of authors and elaboration of methods of an adequate description of concrete language material. For instance, QRD gives a detailed semantic description of words denoting concrete objects (that make a considerable part of the vocabulary of everyday language) with the indication of various differential signs of realities; groups of lexemes are followed by an extralinguistic commentary representing links to reference books, parallels with dialect material, historical and ethnocultural data. A characteristic feature of the lexical system of the language of Muscovite Russia is a broadly developed synonymy. The mark sr. ("see") allows to show the paradigmatic relations developing in the language of the 16th-17th centuries and to present their specific (frequent sense identity, variety of one-root synonyms, pleonasm and abundance of the system in the sphere of synonymic relations, etc.). Due to the goal of the most complete presentation of the functioning of each unit in texts, QRD depicts cases of special functioning of each lexeme and idiom allocated on the basis of lexical, stylistic and syntactic factors. Some lexemes have broad meanings in everyday language which is interpreted with the help of the mark syncret. Also, the entry shows cases of situational metonymy, typical for informal conversation. The creation of QRD is supposed to realize the systematic lexicographic descriptions of the Old Russian in future.

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