Substandard Units of the Language Landscape of the Middle Ob Region: Composition and Functioning in the Speech of the Traditional Dialect Speaker

The aim of the article is to analyze the composition and functioning of substandard vocabulary and phraseology in the speech of a dialect language personality. The sources of the material are the author's archive of records of the spontaneous speech of a Siberian peasant woman (1981-2004) and a dictionary that reflects her vocabulary. The layer of substandard units of the dialect speaker was distinguished on the basis of the signs: (1) the speaker's expression of disapproval of someone or something, (2) the rudeness of the word used, and (2) the violation of the etiquette norm. Metatexts (judgments about the norms of word use, assessment of units) and hidden meta-indicators (prosodic signs, ellipsis of a substandard element, replacing it with a normative word or euphemism, apology formulas, etc.) facilitated the identification of substandard vocabulary in the speech of the dialect speaker. The limitations of the substandard vocabulary use when communicating with different types of interlocutors were also taken into account. It was found that substandard elements make up an insignificant share in the vocabulary of the individual - less than 1% of its total volume. The nuclear zone of such elements - both in terms of the number of units and their functional load - includes abusive, non-obscene words; the peripheral zone includes individual components of synonymous series; obscenities, scatologies, and ill-wishes occupy an intermediate position between them. The degree of the substandardness in invectives in the idiolect of the peasant woman is not the same. Obscenisms are the most substandard. The informant perceives non-obscene abusive words as less substandard; in other groups, the substandardness is a variable value depending on the factors influencing communication. The intentions expressed by substandard words are manifold. The addressee uses such words for insulting a person extremely rarely; more frequent is their use for a nominative function; even more often they are used to reliably convey someone else's speech or to release psychological tension. The evaluative function can be considered the dominant one: abusive non-obscene vocabulary implements a negative assessment directly, the rest of the substandard words and expressions convey it indirectly, through the context. The discourse of the dialect speaker reflects a high level of control in the verbalization of substandard nominations, multiple methods of mitigating their abnormality in personal contacts, as well as the informant's “non-appropriation” of many means associated exclusively with the category of someone else's speech. The area of the substandard is outside the normative word use in the dialect. At the same time, the functional features of substandard vocabulary and phraseology indicate the links between the basic principles of their use with speech etiquette. These connections are indicated by the speaker's consideration of the communication situation, the choice of a linguistic unit from a number of options depending on the intention, control of the speech flow, the subject's preference for less substandard units to more substandard ones.

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