Folk culture constants in linguistic realisation of concept of child (based on material of Middle Priobie dialects)

The article covers analysis of lexical units, which represent the concept of the child in folk culture. At present dialectal culturallinguistics, called to model dialectal linguistic world-image, is quickly developing. The urgency of studying folk dialects and dialectalword's cultural meanings is caused by social aspiration for self-cognition, which among other things is achieved by means of traditionalculture exploration. The present research has been based on the material of Middle Priobie dialects. The object of the research is adialectal word, which contains a cultural component in its semantic structure. The approach to the lexical dialect system is realizedthrough characterizing the concept of the child from the positions of cultural linguistics. The choice of this concept as the researchobject is caused by the fact that from the scientific point of view childhood is a particular phenomenon, which, when studied, shows theworld of ''adult'' culture and makes it possible to remodel its world-view principles. In the peasants' world family is the basic communityunit, which explains the village society's great attention to inter-family relationship. Families, in which parents have children together,are considered the standard. The deviation from the norm is registered by means of the language. The article covers lexicalrepresentation of three situations closely connected with the child's family status: belonging to one of the spouses only, orphanhood andillegitimacy. On traditional mind's mental level there is an opposition of related and unrelated children, which is realized insyntagmatic expansion. The ''related - unrelated'' opposition is a special case of ''one's own - somebody else's'' opposition, according towhich everything that is not ''one's own'' or ''together'' is estranged. The idea of ''extraneity'' models stereotyped images of the unjustlyoppressed stepson and stepdaughter. The denomination ''orphan'' marks a child who lost parents out of other children's mass. In folkmind the image of the orphan is closely connected with the notion of fate. Orphan's emotional deprivation is explained by his loneliness.Compassionate treatment of orphans is represented on the language level through the ability of this word to have a diminutive form andits semantic support. The natural child in traditional culture is a marginal creature by birth. Since he was born out of wedlock, outsidethe law, he is unprotected before the society. Negative attitude towards the woman who gave birth out of wedlock and her child isrealized in abusive, insulting designations. There are also denominations formed from reputed loci of the natural child's conception orbirth. Their semantics is opposed to the idea of the house as ''one's own'' space. It is remarkable that there are no particular appellationsfor legitimate children since legitimacy is considered as a norm and is not marked by linguistic means. Thus, the consideration oflinguistic realisation of the notion of the child's family status allows us model a fragment of the native dialect speaker's value worldimage.It is possible to make a conclusion that family occupies one of the fundamental places in the world-view constants of traditionalculture.

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