"What is Bad" by a traditional folk speech culture representative

This article analyzes the negative pole of assessment in the vocabulary of a typical representative of the Siberian old-timer dialects V.P. Vershinina, a resident of Vershinino Settlement of Tomsk Region. The positive pole of evaluation of her vocabulary has been analysed earlier. The source of the study was The Unabridged Dictionary of a Dialect Language Personality (Tomsk, 2006-2012, in four volumes), its card files, text archive of expedition records of informant's spontaneous speech made in the conditions of inclusion in the speaker's language environment. Negative assessment in the vocabulary of V.P. Vershinina is expressed by 29 words. It is represented by nests of lexical units and idioms with roots худ-, плох-, and stem нехорош- in 116 lexical-semantic variants (617 word usages in the files of the dictionary). The analysis showed that in the idiolect of V.P. Vershinina negative assessment, as well as the positive one, covers all spheres of life: ''person'','' nature'', ''artifacts'', ''food'', ''abstractions''. Just like positive assessment, the negative focuses mainly on the person in their physical, mental and social characteristics. The types of assessment (aspected / systematic, rational / emotional, pragmatical / esthetic), and their proportion coincide. Aspected assessment clearly dominates in the field of ''person'', which is most multifaceted. As negative assessment of something is rational in its basis, the predominance of the rational over the emotional is regular. The dominance of the pragmatical over the esthetic is due to the specifics of folk speech culture, which values good more than beauty. However, for negative assessment the esthetic is even less relevant than for the positive. Negative assessment in the vocabulary of the language personality is presented by more diverse lexical, grammatical and word-formation means in comparison with the positive one. Negative assessment in the lexicon of the dialect speaker is characterized by a clear manifestation of dialect features at the levels of semantics and formal means of expression. The use of the considered words in speech is connected with etiquette orientations of the language personality. Direct negative assessment of a person occurs as self-assessment or in the absence of the person assessed. There are also various ways of lessening the degree of negative assessment. In this field it is the connotative semantics of extenuation (плохенький, плоховато, худенький); outside the field it is synonymous substitutes (неважный, неважно, неважненький). Thus, the study of ''what is good and what is bad'' by a folk speech culture representative provides abundant material for the reconstruction of the linguistic world image and identification of specific axiological sets of a dialect speaker.

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