Names of Cuckoo and Cuckoo Chick in Russian Folk Linguistics

Abstract

The research is carried out in the context of ethnolinguistics, which is aimed at analyzing nominations of ecosystem objects as means of presenting relations between language and culture, and in particular, specificity in their perception by various ethnical and subethnical (dialect) groups. The authors rely on two suppositions: though flora and fauna are reflected diacritically in linguistic consciousness of various dialect communities due to physical, geographical, social environment, there exist some universal lexical and phraseological language means to describe every object of nature. The purpose of the article is to determine the regularities in nomination of the cuckoo as a significant linguocultural representative of fauna. The material for the study was the card file of the Linguistic Atlas of Russian folk dialects, stored at the Institute for linguistic research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg). The research has shown that the nominations of the cuckoo and the cuckoo chick have special implications in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian people. These units have onomatopoietic origin, they have undergone phonetic, derivational and semantic transformations in the Russian dialect continuum. Ornithonyms implement a binary semantic correlation, linking the sphere of living nature, to which they belong by denotative features, and the human character – the area where their development of connotative-contextual semantics leads, due to the specifics of the linguocreative thinking of the language personality.