LEXICAL PARALLELS IN SMOLENSK AND MOGILEV DIALECTS (NON-DERIVATED VOCABULARY)

Abstract

Smolensk dialects are closely connected with the Belarusian border dialects like Vitebsk and Mogilev ones, which is caused by the history and cultural characteristics of the territory. Throughout the Russian-Belarusian border, in the Smolensk region, there is a kind of language continuum, which is of interest in terms of the description of the existing private dialect systems, their functioning in synchrony and diachrony, the study of mechanisms involved in their interaction and independent development. Particular dialect systems are opposed, on the one hand, to the Russian standard language, in which they normally do not find lexical correspondences, on the other hand, to the Belarusian standard language, in which a number of correspondences are found due to the peculiarities of the standard Belarusian language formation on the basis of Belarusian dialects. All detected dialectal lexical parallels have been described with the classification criterion of the derivated character of the dialectal vocabulary. The reason for this is the specific nature of the functioning of non-derivated and derivated dialect vocabulary in related groups of dialects: non-derivated words as a whole make up about a third of all detected Russian- Belarusian dialect correspondences and demonstrate a sufficiently large number of semantic changes within a lexeme, they are less stable in semantics compared with derivated dialect nouns.In Smolensk and Mogilev dialects 51 lexical dialecticisms have been discovered,among the studied lexical parallels 36 nouns are typical for the dialects of Smolensk and Mogilev, while another 15 nouns with small changes in the semantics or grammatical form are found in the Belarusian standard language.