Deverbatives in Russian Dialects Spoken on the Territory of Mordovia

Abstract

The article deals with deverbatives (names of actions) represented in Russian dialects spoken on the territory of the Republic of Mordovia. The research aim is to describe semantic peculiarities and uniqueness of the word formation and morphemic structure of the nouns belonging to this class. Deverbatives are considered as syncretic unities that are built by merging the grammatical features of both a verb and a noun, typical of the Russian language. The deverbative origin results in preserving the semantics of an abstract action; according to their semantic structure, they can be divided into two main groups: the actions performed by human beings and the ones without their participation. The latter are animals' and birds' motions, natural phenomena, stages in a process or time intervals. It is noted that some language units are subjected to specialization of lexical meaning, processual semantics loss sand are used to nominate an object, place or time of action. Deverbatives have been characterized as demonstrating underdeveloped system of paradigmatic relations. They are derived of national and dialectal verbal stems in full accordance with the general Russian word formation rules and models, including the most productive morphological pattern with its suffixal and zero affixation variants, and the least productive ones, as prefixation-suffixation and complex suffixation. Since deverbatives are closely connected with intellectual human activity, worldview and reality awareness, they constitute unique fragments of dialectal mentality.