FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF DIALECT SPEECH

Abstract

The uniqueness of dialect speech in general and of individual dialects is determined not only by the presence of specific units – the dialecticisms and associated with them interdialectal and dialect-literary differences, but also by the nature of the dialecticism word usage, functional relationship between dialect-literary correspondences, and the specific distribution of units of the national language in the speech of dialect speakers. The study was conducted with the material from the Saratov Dialect Corpus – samples from text subcorpora of dialects in the Saratov and Vologda regions, comprising a total of approximately 750,000 word tokens. The article presents the methodology and results of a functional analysis of non-literary vocabulary with various types; morphology in the speech of dialect speakers; the results of a functional (quantitative) assessment of the semantic and thematic composition of dialect speech; the peculiarities of the parts of speech usage in it; the distribution of the most important grammatical categorical meanings of nouns (distribution of case forms) and verbs (distribution of tense forms and their meanings).The quantitative distribution of the specified units is based on the samples from the dialects of different types (the Central Russian dialect with retention of unstressed "o" of Belogornoye village, Volsky district, Saratov region; the Central Russian dialect of Zemlyanye Khutora village; Atkarsky district, Saratov region, and the Northern Russian dialect of Megra village, Vytegorsky district, Vologda Region). Among the lexical units and morphological forms that do not coincide with the literary standard, the elements with different functional characteristics are identified, occupying a specific place on the scale of speech regularity/irregularity. High-frequency thematic word groups representing the specific world framework of the traditional folk culture speakers have been distinguished in the lexical and semantic structure of dialect speech. The functioning of case and verb tense meanings in dialect speech is explored, as well as the relationship between the specific distribution of these forms and the communicative and cognitive properties of dialect speech.