Concept “Document” in the Speech of Peasants (Based on the Materials of the Tomsk Dialect Corpus)

The article is based on the oral speech of Russian peasants, recorded on the territory along the middle course of the river Ob (Tomsk and Kemerovo regions) for 75 years. The main source of the study is a thematically annotated dialect corpus, which includes 2 million tokens. In the course of study I have analysed 128 text fragments related to the topic “Documents”. Based on the analysis of dictionary definitions, I identified the components of the “Document” concept: ‘something related to public or service activities’; ‘something new’; ‘enforces rights’; ‘can serve as proof of something’. In the figurative layer of the concept, manifested in the inner form of words, its core features are fixed: materiality, connection with the spheres of education, state, and interpersonal relations. At the same time, already at this level, there is a connection with feelings and evaluation. It has been established that the central cognitive feature of the “Document” concept is its novelty, which is associated with such associative features as ‘a document is something incomprehensible’, ‘a document can serve as a means of deception’. The last of them probably reflects the specifics of folk speech culture. The value layer of the concept, manifested in the discourse of rural residents, combines positive (a document as a recognition of a person's merits, a source of pride, a museum exhibit) and negative (a document as something useless) evaluative components. It has been established that the semantic components ‘document fixes the true state of affairs’, ‘document fixes rights’ in dialect discourse are updated infrequently, although they occupy a central position in the dictionary representation of the concept.

dialectology, dialectal discourse, Russian dialects of Siberia, the concept “Document”, dialectal corpus