The Living and the Dead" in the Funeral and Wake Rites of Perm Prikamye

The article considers the nominations of the characters of the funeral and wake tradition and the semantic and symbolic interpretation of their functions in the ritual text. The characters of the rite are understood to be agents who, according to traditional views, represent the physical and metaphysical aspects of the world organisation: living people and the deceased in their material and non-material essence. The study is based on the Perm dialect speech recorded from the middle of the 20th century to the present. The speech is analysed using semantic-thematic, derivational, linguistic semiotic and conceptological. The results of the study reveal the following. In terms of the thematic-semantic properties of the vocabulary, the groups of "the living" and "the dead" are heterogeneous. The "living" characters of the funeral are ritual specialists, situationally selected figures and random participants. The names of the dead form two categories of vocabulary: words for "clean" and for "unclean" dead people; these meanings do not directly derive from the meaning of the terms. The conceptual scheme of the funeral characters expressed through the semantic opposition "living-dead" is based on the idea of duality. In the cultural semiotic code of the rite, this idea is manifested through the "mirroring" of semantic units included in the given opposition and in the external opposition "Us-Them". In the linguistic code of the хйе, the morphemic, lexical and etymological means contribute to the expression of the duality of "the living" and "the dead", "Us" and "Them". By its typological nature, the system of ritual characters and their nominations is a Christian-pagan one. It is extremely difficult to unambiguously interpret linguistic signs according to the nature of their reference to a particular mythological model. The pre-Christian corpus of symbols has the ethnolinguistic features of the Slavic and Finno-Ugric traditions. The complex of cultural meanings presented in Perm dialects is a local variant of the generalised scheme of the Slavic burial rite. Numerous intersections between these linguuistic semiotic systems are found on the conceptual and image-symbolic levels. However, at the linguistic level, Perm funeral and wake terminology is a completely independent, original and expressive system. Its originality results from a profound quantitative study of the thematic field and the involvement of a wide range of motivational features, some of which were not part of the Slavs' vocabulary.

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