Concept “Document” in the Speech of Peasants (Based on the Materials of the Tomsk Dialect Corpus)

The article is based on the oral speech of Russian peasants, recorded
on the territory along the middle course of the river Ob (Tomsk and Kemerovo
regions) for 75 years. The main source of the study is a thematically annotated
dialect corpus, which includes 2 million tokens. In the course of study I have
analysed 128 text fragments related to the topic “Documents”. Based on the
analysis of dictionary defi nitions, I identifi ed the components of the “Document”
concept: ‘something related to public or service activities’; ‘something
new’; ‘enforces rights’; ‘can serve as proof of something’. In the fi gurative layer
of the concept, manifested in the inner form of words, its core features are fi xed:
materiality, connection with the spheres of education, state, and interpersonal
relations. At the same time, already at this level, there is a connection with feelings
and evaluation. It has been established that the central cognitive feature of
the “Document” concept is its novelty, which is associated with such associative
features as ‘a document is something incomprehensible’, ‘a document can serve
as a means of deception’. The last of them probably refl ects the specifi cs of folk
speech culture. The value layer of the concept, manifested in the discourse
of rural residents, combines positive (a document as a recognition of a person’s
merits, a source of pride, a museum exhibit) and negative (a document as something useless) evaluative components. It has been established that the
semantic components ‘document fi xes the true state of affairs’, ‘document fi xes
rights’ in dialect discourse are updated infrequently, although they occupy a central
position in the dictionary representation of the concept