The concept “bread” in the discourse of a dialect language personality

The work is part of a large-scale project to study the phenomenon of dialect language personality carried out by scholars of the Tomsk Dialectology School. The article analyses the concept BREAD in the linguopersonology aspect, based on the discursive data of a specific dialect speaker. The material of the work was the texts of the Siberian peasant Vera Vershinina (1909-2004) reflected in the full type idiolect dictionary and in the author's archive of the informant's speech recordings. The main conceptual areas of the concept are related to the concept of bread as a growing grain and as a food product; there are transitional zones between them (grain in ears, collected grain, flour ground from it, some types of baked products close to bread). Verbalisation of these meanings is represented by the polysemantic name of the concept under consideration, a few derivatives from it, as well as an extensive denotative layer with designations of varieties of grains and baked products, actions aimed at growing and baking bread, its regulatory qualities and evaluations. The generalised meanings of the lexeme “bread” (“food in general”; “earnings, means of subsistence”), reflected in the literary language, are almost not represented in the discourse of the studied language personality. Transferred meanings (“something necessary”, “most necessary”, etc.) do not exclude the direct meaning “specific type of a baked product”. The speech syncretism of many expressions and the weak development of abstract semantics give grounds for conclusions about the preservation of features of the pre-logical consciousness. This concept has a highly developed evaluation layer. Evaluations of bread are predominantly pragmatic. Bread is considered the foundation of life and staple food. The peasant supports the idea of bread as the highest value by texts of myths, prayers, sayings, historical memory of the shortage of bread during the crop failure and wars, the awareness of the labour invested in bread production based on her personal experience. The links of the concept BREAD with the concepts LABOR and LIFE are logical. Pagan and Christian rituals, customs and mythological images relating to arable farming and bread baking occupy an important place in the ritual layer of the concept. The concept BREAD, therefore, is connected with the concept TRADITION as the basis of folk speech culture. At the same time, the discourse of the language personality under study, whose life almost completely covers the past century of the life of Russian society, demonstrates the transition of many features of the considered concept from topical to historical. This is reflected in the archaisation of a number of units of the lexicon, in the extinction of the ritual component in the consciousness of the dialect speaker.

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