Lexical Atlas of the Russian Folk Dialects. Vol. 1. The plant world / Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences; Institute of Slavic Studies, RAS; ed. by T. I. Vendina. Moscow; Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2017. 736 p.

Abstract

The review is devoted to the first volume of the Lexical Atlas of Russian Folk Dialects (Moscow, 2017, еxecutive editor Tatyana I. Vendina), which has the subtitle The plant world and starts the thematic series Nature. The review discusses the structure of the Atlas, the principles of mapping dialect lexemes, and the types of maps that the authors of the Atlas have developed for specific purposes of linguistic geography. Dialect lexical material is distributed in the Atlas in several thematic groups: 1. Nominations of forest areas, including common forest names; 2. Tree nominations; 3. Bush nominations; 4. Nominations of various herbs; 5. Nominations of berries; 6. Nominations of wild flowers and medicinal herbs; 7. Nominations of mushrooms. This vocabulary, considered in the perspective of linguistic geography, reveals the diversity of the Russian dialect continuum. The authors of the Atlas have developed different types of maps according to their tasks and method of execution, so that lexical, semantic and word-forming similarities and differences of the vocabulary distributed in these thematic groups are correctly reflected on the maps and remain readable. There are lexical, semantic, lexical-word-formation, word-formation, motivational, and nominative maps in the Atlas. The linguistic material is represented on the dialect landscape by various icons: geometric figures supplemented by internal or external diacritics. When the dialect continuum turns out to be dispersed, the authors propose doublet maps that help achieve greater generalisation. The reviewed Atlas demonstrates the main lexical differences between the Southern and Northern Russian dialects or between the Russian East and West. The authors of the Atlas also note the so-called exclusive lexemes, which appeared as a result of borrowing into the dialect from the standard language or from other languages or derived from new dialect words and which characterise the Northern and Southern Russian dialects.