Symbolic semantics of the ritual word: Features of a lexicographic description
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Bankova Tatiana B. , Tarakanova Daria A. ,   National Research Tomsk State University
Published: November 2024

National tradition has developed a way of fixing and preserving information about the world in the form of an immanent symbol system capable of holding entire cultural texts. The material world involved in symbol creation was endowed with a sacred content. The collective’s universal rites, which include the wedding, preserve the culture’s ethnic integrity. The wedding ceremony is one of the components of the sacred core of culture. The actualization of the symbolic content of the wedding tradition is obligatory. The language code of the rite includes units of different levels; the main load falls on the lexical layer. Ritual words construct the sacred meaning of the ritual; they contain a group of lexemes, the meaning of which develops to the level of the abstract that translates the idea of the peasant collective about the existential world order. These words are the result of their semantics’ translation from profane to existential, and its completion is fixed by the presence of a symbolic component in the meaning of the word. The aim of the study is to determine the procedure for fixing the symbolic semantics of ritual units in a dialect dictionary of a linguoculturological type, which is the Dictionary of the Siberian Wedding Rite. The work is based on the dialects of the Middle Ob region, which objectify the local version of the Siberian wedding tradition. The study focused on ritual words – culturally marked dialect units that are a fact of the living dialect communication of speakers of Middle Ob dialects. The form of representation of ritual words is a linguocultural commentary, which fixes and manifests the symbolic meaning of lexical units relevant for the linguocultural community in the zone of interpretation. The content parts of the commentary are extracted from the speech practice of dialect speakers – statements expressing the symbolic meaning of the dialect word. To implement the idea, the lexicographic method and the method of linguoculturological commenting or interpretation were employed. In the course of the study, the use of markers fixing the symbolic semantics of lexemes in the Dictionary of the Siberian Wedding Rite was comprehended. Facts were demonstrated based on which markers “symbol” and “symbolizes” appear in the comments. As a rule, “symbol” is used when describing the semantics of a lexical unit nominating objects involved in the rite, while “symbolizes” in commentaries of adjectives and verbs. Symbolic words also include units from the folklore repertoire of the wedding ceremony. The lexicography of ritual words that have a symbolic component of semantics reveals the problem of its adequate representation in dictionaries of a linguoculturological type. In the Dictionary of the Siberian Wedding Rite, to represent the semantics of symbolic words, only the live speech of peasants, residents of a large territory of the Middle Ob region, is used, which quantitatively confirms the existence of a sacred core of culture, actualized in the collective’s linguistic existence.