The Representation of the Concept “Road” in Oral Stories of Siberians
Authors:   Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russian Federation), Voloshina Svetlana V. , Tolstova Maria A. ,   Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russian Federation)
Published: March 2021

The article describes the concept “road” as represented in oral stories of Siberians. This investigation is part of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Siberia as a cross-border area. The research materials are: texts of the Tomsk Dialect Corpus, which were recorded during dialectological expeditions from the 1940s to 2019 in the areas where old-timer Middle Ob region dialects are spoken; information from dialect dictionaries, memoirs and oral stories of eyewitnesses and witnesses of dekulakization and exile to the Narym region; materials of the project “Free and Non-Free Siberians” published on the website of the Tomsk Regional Museum of Local Lore. A concept is a unit of consciousness that is represented by means of a language. The article uses a modeling method that is implemented through the description of the nominative field of the concept “road”, which includes both direct nominations of the concept itself and nominations of its individual cognitive features. Among the units that represent the concept “road”, there are: the word road and its synonym way, their derivatives, as well as words that name roads in accordance with their various characteristics, words of different parts of speech and phrases that contain the seme “road”: traffic, taxi, taxi driver, turnpike, country road, to go, to swim, to get lost, and many others. The contextual analysis of the material revealed that the following cognitive features receive language objectification: 1) the size of the road and its importance, 2) the use of roads depending on the time of year, 3) place of laying the road, 4) the kind of transport and method of travel, 5) the material from which the road is made, 5) the quality of the road 6) the direction of the road, 7) the road as an integral part of migration processes, 8) construction, laying and maintenance of roads, 9) the road as a factor in the formation of different social ties, communities and an additional reason for economic activity (crafts, entrepreneurship, etc.), 10) the road as an indicator of the development of Siberia, civilization and improvement, 11) the road as a dangerous place, 12) the road as a way of localization, 13) the road as an attribute of superstitions, rituals. Siberians’ autobiographical stories and memoirs contain fragments that reflect the importance and significance of the road in human life. Facts from people’s life connected with the road are: birth on the road, road to school/university/institute, wedding, work, moving, death. The road is a significant fragment of the Siberians’ worldview; it reflects the spatial and temporal characteristics of people’s lives, representing the “friend/foe” opposition. Formal (changes in road categories, obsolescence of expressions, new stable combinations and lexemes) and substantive (new roads, reinterpretation, de-ideologization of road spaces associated with the repressive policy of the state, etc.) transformations in the structure of the concept are due to time (change of epochs) and to political and economic factors.