Dialectal expressions with the verb ostat’sya ‘to stay’ as markers of decline in the Russian village: Semantics and the component structure [Диалектные выражения с глаголом остаться как обозначения упадка в русской деревне: Семантика и компонентный состав 1]

Abstract

Russian dialectal expressions with the verb ostat’sya ‘to stay’, describing the extinction of the village, are analysed in semantic and motivational aspects. The communicative goal of these expressions is an expression of regret at the disappearance of villages. Expressions with the verb ostat’sya are one of the means of marking social change. Speech units in this group are used when comparing of the past and the present is the subject of the speech. The mental construct of occurring changes represented in these nominations is in the area of the temporal picture of the world. At first glance, these expressions are based on the quantitative denotation of “no one stays in the village / few stay”, because they imply an indication that people permanently move to the city for permanent residence, they leave the village. However, motivation underlying the majority of such utterances in fact is even narrower – “only people of a certain kind stay”, that is, people who belong to the “social periphery”. The quantitative seme does not disappear, it remains at the level of the grammatical structure of the utterance in the form of a two-term syntactic constructions with the connecting conjunction i, da ‘and’; however, the person’s “social quality” characteristic still comes first. The focus is shifted to the proposition “unfit people left”. The place of the quantitative feature is taken by the idea of a “social attribute”. The choice of the nominator in its favour is determined by the pragmatic world-view of the person of traditional culture, who tends to evaluate a person by the criterion “fit / unfit” to work. The contexts easily reconstruct directions of unfitness detailing. The following social strata and groups are “unfit”: (1) children (2) elderly people, (3) those who are not able to work, (4) infirm, (5) useless (6) the poor. In all six cases, the specification of the expressions denotation implies the labour characteristic of a person (non-participation in the working life of the village): children and the elderly cannot work in full force, the shiftless do not want to work, the infirm are unable to work, etc. The analysis of the material shows that gradually the logic of understanding of the situation by a native speaker begins to dominate over the logic of language. This can particularly often be observed with an increase in expression. To the greatest extent, the internal potency of the language is expressed in the use of anthroponyms in the structure of the considered utterances. The semantics of the unfit is expressed by the use of Russian names in the structure of phraseological units. These names are signs that denote a set of meanings arising from language attractions or on the basis of the precedent content if talking about a mythological character. The expressive power of anthroponyms and quasi-names takes precedence over the specific meaning ‘no one’, ‘few’, and better suits for expressing ideas about the dwindling human resources of the Russian countryside. © 2018 Tomsk State University. All Rights Reserved.