Russian River Names: The Potential of Semantic Development (With Reference to Dialectal Vocabulary)

Abstract

The article considers appellative derivatives from river names used in Russian dialects. Such common nouns are attested in different regions of Russia, mainly in the area of the Russian North. The author identifies nine recipient thematic groups displaying the depotamonymic word-formational pattern: fish; plants and animals; winds; seasonal works; river transport; dances; household utensils. The author shows that the nouns derived from river names can constitute lexical systems, exemplified by the names of fish species (sumskaya seld and sorokskaya seld), winds (in the Lake Baikal area: angara, katluk, sarma, frolikha), various kinds of quadrille (pizhemskaya, verkhovazhskaya quadrille). The author also identifies the structural types of derivatives, noting that the most numerous are suffixed derivatives (veksar, visherka, mokshan, tikhvinka, ustyak) and adjectival collocations (andogsky veter, sukhonsky len, shekhonskaya sominka). The paper describes some exclusive semantic derivational patterns proper only to river names (and not to other kinds of toponyms), such are derivatives from river names designating seasonal works (angarshchina, vaganit') and dances (verkhnetayomka, pezhemskaya igra).

Keywords

• Russian dialects
• place names
• river names
• hydronyms
• toponymic derivatives
• appellativization of a proper name
• ideographic analysis
• motivational analysis
• semantic pattern