TYPOLOGY AND SYMBOLIC MEANINGS OF THE HOUSE SPIRIT NOMINATIONS IN RUSSIAN NATIONAL DIALECTS
Authors: Якушевич И.В. , Ивашинина Н.С. 
Published: July 2024

В статье собраны и систематизированы диалектные названия домового разных регионов России. Актуальность исследования обусловлена необходимостью реконструировать локус, внешний облик, характерное поведение, оценочность образа русского домового и объективно противопоставить национальный образ сложившимся медийным стереотипам. Источником данной семантики является внутренняя форма диалектизмов. Найденные мотивационные семы легли в основу типологии диалектизмов и ряда их символических значений: 1) предок, 2) огонь, 3) потусторонний мир, 4) достаток, 5) двойник. Статью завершает собирательный семантический портрет русского домового.

The article is devoted to the systematization and etymological analysis of the dialect nominations of a Slavic house spirit ‘domovoy’ in different regions of Russia. The relevance of the study is due, firstly, to the fact that in Russian linguistics there are very few works dedicated to the corpus of dialect names of the house spirit. Most of them are related to historical, ethnographic, folklore, literary, mythological, and esoteric studies. The systematization of the nominations of ‘domovoy’ reveals culturally significant criteria by which this mythological character exists in the linguistic picture of the world of the people. Secondly, in the situation of persistent and even aggressive expansion of the linguistic multicultural space, on the one hand, the interest of all Russian language learners in Slavic culture and mythology is stimulated. On the other hand, there is an urgent need to preserve the national linguistic heritage and based on it to reconstruct the ancient Slavic mythological worldview and symbols, which will help to solve the issue of ethnic identity of the people. The fundamental principle of dialects systematization is researching the inner form of the word (F. von Humboldt, A.A. Potebnya, N.F. Alefirenko). As a result of an extensive and continuous sampling using a number of dialect dictionaries, 11 groups of ‘domovoy’ nominations were formed based on the root morphemes with the following semantics: 1) ‘place’, 2) ‘relationship’, 3) ‘domovoy’s activities’, 4) ‘attitude’, 5) ‘appearance’, 6) ‘ani-mal’, 7) ‘shadow’, 8) ‘light’, 9) ‘fat’ (semantics of wellbeing and prosperity, 10) ‘time’. The last group is formed by taboo nominations for the pronoun used for domovoy. The inner form of the word determines not only the motivation of lexemes, but also objective symbolic meanings of the word (A.N. Afanasiev, A.A. Potebnya, A.N. Toporov). The lexeme was considered as a semantic and semiotic model of the symbol — a sign, consisting of three components: (1) word, (2) perceptive image, presented as a concept, (3) symbolic meaning, revealed as a result of reconstruction of the inner form of dialect nominations. The perceptual image expressed by the word is the signifier of the symbol, and the symbolic meaning is the signified. The study found the following symbolic meanings of the house spirit: (1) ancestor, (2) Русский язык: национальная норма, диалект, говор 123 fire, (3) underworld, death, (4) wealth, (5) a double. The article concludes with a collective semantic portrait of a Russian house spirit created as a result of the generalization.