Representation of Suffering in the Vocabulary of the Dialect Language Personality of a Siberian Peasant Woman

Abstract

The article examines the semantic field “suffering” that represents a fragment of the emotional and sensual existence of a language personality. The linguopersonological research based on the material of the idiolectal vocabulary of Vera Vershinina, a Siberian old resident, continues the comprehensive description of a dialect language personality made by Tomsk dialectologists. The research sources are A Complete Dictionary of a Dialect Language Personality edited by E.V. Ivantsova, transcripts of the informant’s speech made through participation in the linguistic existence of the speaker. The article focuses on 52 lexical and phraseological units. The research aims to describe a fragment of an individual linguistic worldview representing suffering. The view on the research object develops in the following way: word – definition – examples represented in the dictionary – text – idiolectal discourse. At the first stage of the research, the lexical and phraseological units are divided into seven functional semantic classes (FSC) according to the categorial lexical seme uniting them. The researcher examines the numerical composition of each class, the linguistic features of its elements (presence of figurative units, features of the use of the examined words). The most developed is the FSC of emotional state, since suffering is perceived as a long and deep feeling caused by a certain reason, but infinite. Classes of emotional impact and receiving the emotional state characterize suffering as a feeling hurting physically, exhausting with its length and intensity. A large number of units with the semantics of weeping in the FSC of external expression of emotions can indicate that the informant replaces reflection with a detailed description of external manifestations of suffering. Classes of emotional characterization and attitude show the informant as a person deeply empathetic to the grief of others. The last FSC demonstrates that names of the feeling and the situation causing this feeling coexist in one unit, which is typical for representatives of the folk speech culture. At the second stage of the research, the author describes the most frequent situations associated with the actualization of the semantic field “suffering” in the informant’s speech. These situations include: disease or death; disability caused by an injury; difficult living conditions, etc. It corresponds to the core values of the traditional peasant culture: life and health of a person, wealth, stability of a family’s life. The material shows that, for the dialect speaker, suffering is one of the dominants of reality, a constant of everyday life fully accepted by the speaker. However, the informant does not ignore other people in her grief, she is empathetic towards their life because of such personal qualities as optimism and spiritual power.