The adverbs of place in the Russian dialects of Outer Manchuria

Abstract

Based on the materials of the Russian dialects of Outer Manchuria, this article examines the previously unstudied group of adverbs – the adverbs of place. The methods of continuous sampling and descriptive-analytical analysis revealed 56 adverbs of place in the second edition of the “Dictionary of Russian Dialects of Outer Manchuria”. Despite the fact that adverbs in the Russian literary language are have been thoroughly studied from the perspective of their semantics, motivation, and compatibility with other parts of speech, the Russian dialectology does not provide due description of the adverbial lexis. Compared to other parts of speech, the category of adverbs is less scientifically developed in the research dedicated to the dialects of late formation. This article presents the experience of describing the semantic characteristics of the adverbs of place typical solely for the Russian dialects of Outer Manchuria, detected via comparison with the linguistic units from the “Dictionary of Russian Folk Dialects”, “Dictionary of the Modern Russian Literary Language”, and “Dictionary of the Russian Language”. An attempt is made to classify the adverbs of place by the types of spatial relations, principles of spatial localization, as well as motivation of the parts of speech. The acquired results demonstrate that in the Russian dialects of Outer Manchuria, the adverbs of place differ not only in lexical composition, but also in semantics of the meanings from their analogues in other Russian folk dialects. They also feature the prevalence of units that characterize horizontal spatial localization.