SPACE AND TIME MARKERS IN THE TEXTS OF RUSSIAN IMPRECATIONS (WITH REFERENCE TO THE RUSSIAN DIALECTS VOCABULARY)


2017. № 2 (12), 137-158

Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin

Abstract:

The article considers models of folk curses (evil sayings, containing wishes of bad luck and misfortune to a particular person) taken from Russian dialect dictionaries. The article analyzes lexically (not grammatically) expressed designations of chronotope, which are found directly in the texts of curses. This material enriches our knowledge of the value marking of time and space in folk mind; additionally, it helps to characterize the lexical structure and principles of folk curse texts organization — a genre of folk speech which has not been studied in detail. The analysis reveals that there are much more space markers in curse models than time markers. They mostly refer to «cursed» places — loci to which the speaker sends the addressee, — real (slough, marsh, objects called by local place names) or unreal (hell). Time markers indicate the specific time of curse realization (early morning, Fomin’s Week) or infinity. The article performs semantic interpretation of a number of «dark» words with locative and temporal meaning functioning in the texts of curses (квомут < к (чертям) в омут, одночастни < одночасье etc.). The article establishes a correlation between time-space markers and methods of organization of a magical text (for example, the method of lexical inertia).