The Didactic Function of the Autobiographical Story (On the Dialect Material)

Abstract

The aim of the article is to identify the means of linguistic expression of the di-dactic function and the factors of this function’s implementation in dialectal autobio-graphical stories. The material of the research is 120 oral autobiographical stories, which were recorded in Tomsk Oblast from the 1960s to 2018 during dialectological expeditions. The source of the material is the texts of the Tomsk dialect corpus (http://losl.tsu.ru/?q=corpus), as well as audio recordings of dialect speech, made by the author of the article during the expeditions in villages Pervomayskoe, Pervomayskiy District of Tomsk Oblast, in 2008, and Melnikovo, Shegarskiy District of Tomsk Ob-last, in 2017–2019. The didactic function is understood as the ability of autobiographical stories, in a broad sense, to be a tool of training, education, transfer of important knowledge about the world, accompanied by the desire of the stories’ authors to teach interlocutors, to explain something to them, to give advice. The author of the article identified the factors of implementing the didactic function in the autobio-graphical story. Among them are: 1) the specificity of dialect discourse: it is focused on tradition, its preservation and translation; 2) the genre of the material: since autobio-graphical texts have a retrospective orientation, informants, reporting on their lives, give an example, a model for the interlocutor to follow, or, vice versa, to avoid errors in life, not to repeat them; 3) the communicative situation and its components: first of all, these are participants of communication – a dialectologist and an informant; they be-long to different types of culture, and informants therefore strengthen the interpretive element in their stories, explaining what a word means, where and how an object is used, etc. As a rule, informants are older, so they give recommendations to dialectolo-gists, teach them: Now, girls, you live in a good century. It is just necessary to work, just to work. To learn, to work, and then all will be well. So, girls, live, take care of your life. Take care of life. The theme, time and space of communication were also identified among the components of the communicative situation. All these factors take part in the representation of the didactic function. It is determined that didacticism can be expressed in the speech genres of advice, explanation, and culinary recipe. The di-dactic function is represented by imperative statements, words of the category of state, statements reflecting informants’ values and ideas about ethical and moral categories, by infinitive constructions, statements with verbs in the form of abstract present or fu-ture tenses, lexemes expressing moral values. It has been determined that the didacti-cism of autobiographical texts is associated with the self-reflection of informants about their lives and, more broadly, with the analysis of generational experience.