Transformation of the siberian food tradition in the discourse of a dialect language personality: Products and dishes

Abstract

Siberian food tradition is seen in the article based on the discursive practice of peasant V.P. Vershinina, born in 1909, a native of Tomsk Oblast. The sources of the analysis were the records of her spontaneous speech and data of Polnyy slovar' dialektnoy yazykovoy lichnosti [Complete Dictionary of a Dialect Language Personality]. A comparative analysis of the period of the 1910s-1920s, reflected in the speech genre of the dialect speaker's memoirs, and of the period from the mid-20th to the early 21st centuries, presented in everyday dialogues, stories about herself and her fellow villagers, is made. The materials show that the food tradition of Siberians has unchanged elements: the basic set of food; consumption of food produced or obtained by a peasant family; syncretic preservation of features of Christian and pagan food culture; high value of bread. These features are constant for the entire Russian food tradition as a whole and contribute to the preservation of national identity. Some of the changes include a decrease in the share of products of subsistence farming by increasing the set of purchased food; modification of cooking methods, reduction of the role of religious and ceremonial elements in peasant culture. Linguistically, these changes are reflected at the level of the lexical-semantic field "food", the concept sphere and the discourse of the dialect language personality. The "food" field is modified by new nominations, including large groups of names of fruit and vegetables, semi-finished products and canned food, marine fish, artificial fats and archaizing designa tions of certain types of baking, roasted vegetables, natural vegetable oils, ritual dishes. Inside the field there is a change of system relations of words: loss or development of formal and semantic variation, transformation of hyponymy-hyperonymy and hyponymy-hyponymy relations. At the conceptual level, a significant reduction in the influence of religious orientations on food tradition is observed. With preserving individual kinds of purely sacred food, the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the festive and the everyday, as well as between individual rites, begin to blur. The discourse level reflects different sides of the change of food tradition through the genre association of texts (memory / story about routine), metatext inclusions, precedent texts (prayers, parables, proverbs and sayings). The transformation of food tradition has a number of reasons: from the change of the social system, the development of technical progress and food industry, intensification of trade relations between countries and regions, stronger links between cities and villages to improvement of the living conditions and welfare of peasants. It seems that the synthesis of the constant features of food tradition and of new phenomena in it, noted in the speech of the Siberian old-timer, represents the current state of the peasant culture as a whole.