Verbalization of the Concept WOMAN (On the Material of Female Dialect Discourse)

Abstract

This article is devoted to the development of a linguistic model for describing the concept WOMAN. The material is women’s dialect discourse. The sources of the material are the Tomsk dialect corpus which includes materials of expeditions organized by dialectologists of Tomsk State University from 1946 to the present days on the territory of Middle Ob dialects spread. In the article we used modeling method based on the idea of the nominative field of a concept, as well as an interpretation technique relying on analysis of contexts, and a method of quantitative calculations used in relation to units that represent the concept. Lexical and phraseological units that make up the nominative field of the concept were revealed during the research. These units were divided into the following lexical-semantic groups: 1) the general nominations of a female person; 2) age and status in marriage; 4) status in the family hierarchy; 5) anatomical and biological characteristics; 6) character traits and behavior; 7) appearance characteristics; 8) profession and work processes. Elements of different layers of the concept are revealed in each lexical- semantic group. All of them give a general picture of ideas about women. So, the basis for identifying of gender conceptualizations and stereotypes is the presence of linguistic oppositions of male and female; the presence of a large number of lexical units that reflect the status of marriage (girl, bride, young woman, wife, mistress, old woman, widow, old girl, brooch and so on); lexical pairs that are opposed to each other on the basis of evaluation “positive” – “negative” (clean, clean – dirty, mistress – disheveled, etc.). A large number of words that negatively assess certain qualities and behavior of women (gossip girl, market woman, stramovka, etc.) indicate the high requirements imposed on the woman, the condemnation of deviations from social norms. The content of the concept of WOMAN depends on the specifics of rural existence, which is based on work, the presence of patriarchal gender stereotypes, social and historical events and processes. The significance of the research is determined by the possibility of using its results for development of a new interdisciplinary scientific field – gender dialectology that studies the gender characteristics of the dialect.