UDC

811.161.1:81’373

Authors

Valeriya S. Kuchko
Russian State Professional Pedagogical University; ul. Mashinostroiteley 11, Yekaterinburg, 620012, Russian Federation;
e-mail: kuchko@inbox.ru

Abstract

This article is focused on Russian dialect vocabulary with the meaning of deception, motivated by -onyms and appellatives related to the social semantic sphere: personal names, toponyms, ethnonyms and words characterizing behaviour, professional activity and social status of a person. The active use of such words to derive linguistic units denoting deception can be explained by the fact that people’s consciousness tries to eliminate the impersonal nature of the situation of deception and assign names to a typical deceiver and the deceived, indicate their ethnicity and occupation, describe their behaviour, etc. Thus, the linguistic facts under consideration, as a rule, represent folk stereotypes about those who deceive and those who are deceived. The dialect material presented in this article is divided into thematic groups, each of which marks a certain aspect of the social person: a personal name (Muhamet ‘thief, rogue, swindler’, used in the Don River area), ethnicity (Tatarin ‘insincere, cunning, sly’, in the Arkhangelsk region), topos (to build America ‘to give it to smb. hot and strong’, in the Arkhangelsk region), behaviour (lodyrnichat’ ‘to trick, cheat, deceive’, in the Vologda region), profession (maklak ‘rogue, swindler, trickster’, in the Arkhangelsk and Tula regions), social status (oboyarit’ ‘to deceive’, in the Kostroma, Pskov, Tver, Yaroslavl, and Krasnoyarsk regions). In addition, the paper suggests a motive-based interpretation of the presented linguistic facts and singles out both linguistic causes proper (phonetic characteristics of the original word, its connotative background, tendency of the units under study toward similarly sounding words and their polysemanticism), and extralinguistic factors stimulating their generation (cultural and historical background).

Keywords

ethnolinguistics, social vocabulary, Russian folk dialects, meaning of deception

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