Gender dialectology and dictionaries as its source

Abstract

This article provides grounds for a new research field, gender dialectology, and identifies sources of gender studies, the main of which is dictionaries. The tasks of gender dialectology include the study of the gender characteristics of dialect communication and the analysis of gender features of the dialect system. The subject, methods and initial concepts of the developed field are considered. Based on the analysis of works on gender linguistics and dialectology, on features of the dialect material, several approaches are identified in the study of gender: lexicographic, communicative-discursive, dynamic, linguistic-cultural, methodological, ontological, source-study. The source-study aspect related to the identification of the range of sources and their informative potential is presented in more detail. At the moment, dialectologists have three kinds of sources: dictionaries and their card files, records of informal oral speech and dialect corpora that are being created at present. One of the representative sources is dictionaries and their card files which provide information for a multidimensional study of gender relations in dialect communication. On the example of three Vershinina's dialect dictionaries of different types, the informative potential of lexicographic sources for the study of gender have been analysed. These are a complete dictionary (Vershininsky Dictionary) and two aspect dictionaries: the Motivational Dictionary and the Dictionary of Figurative Words. Using the Vershininsky Dictionary as a source provides information for identifying the vocabulary of the dialect which includes gender-marked vocabulary. The analysis of this vocabulary helps to see gender asymmetry and gender stereotypes. An important role belong to labels which indicate the style of the word, the sphere of use, novelty, obsoleteness, expressiveness, emotional evaluation, imagery, metaphoricity, systemic correlation, predominance in speech of masculine or feminine parts of speech. The dictionary entry of the Vershininsky Dictionary includes texts and metatexts which contain information related to the reflection of dialect speakers about certain denominations, the identification of the evaluative component of the word, and provides information on extralinguistic realities associated with the lexical unit. The Motivational Dictionary has a high informative potential in the analysis of the cognitive aspects of gender dialectology. It contains a large number of statements reflecting the characteristics of metatext activities of native speakers and representing different strategies for interpreting the motivational meaning which can also be analysed from the gender perspective. The presence of motivational connections and chains makes it possible to identify the verbalisation of gender concepts in the dialect. The Dictionary of Figurative Words shows information about the corpus of metaphorical nominations of a person in the lexical system of the dialect by gender, and about lexical units that can equally apply to a man and a woman. Important information is about the type of the direct nominative meaning the metaphorical meaning corresponds to, that is, what image is in the basis of metaphorical resemblance. The analysis shows the high informative potential of dictionaries for a multidimensional study of gender relations in dialect communication.