TRACES OF OLD RUSSIAN ENCLITICS IN THE OLD BELIEVER DIALECT OF SOUTH AMERICA

 The article presents observations on the function of discourse words found in the Russian dialect of Old Believers in South America or “the Old Believers from Harbin”, elements that can be traced back to the Old Russian enclitics zhe, ti. They include the particles zhet’, dazhet’, uzhet’, the adverb tozhet’, the conjunction chtobyt’, and the parenthetical word mozhet’. The study is based on full transcripts of audio recordings, amounting to 7.5 hours, of the speech of five Old Believers, with 1.5 hours from each informant. The author demonstrates the semantics of discourse units, which are variants of the words without the final -t’ in the speech of the Old Believers from Harbin; analyzes the individual preferences of the informants for using one variant or the other; and presents the results of the linguistic geographical analysis of the material using the Russian dialectal hypertext thesaurus. The investigated material confirms the statement that the dialects used by Old Believers living abroad preserve ancient linguistic features lost in the mother country’s dialects.