On lexicographic description of the toponymic variant Piter

Abstract

The article presents arguments for listing the lexeme Piter, an unofficial, yet rather common name for the city of St. Petersburg, in dictionaries. To substantiate their draft dictionary entry, the authors bring in research data, the Russian National Corpus (RNC), contemporary information resources, as well as results of an associative verbal experiment they conducted. Having analyzed linguistic and encyclopedic dictionaries, the authors found the lexeme either missing or marked as a “vulgar”, “vernacular”, or “colloquial” name of St. Petersburg. However, both RNC and new media equally confirm that the toponymic variant Piter is commonly used in the contemporary Russian language. Moreover, it bears certain semantic load in fiction and mass media texts and forms the context. That allows arguing for listing the lexeme Piter in dictionaries for cultural and country studies through linguistics, as well as for developing a dictionary entry that would contain a relevant cultural linguistic commentary (CLC). The authors based the CLC of their draft dictionary entry on the concept of chronotope. It helped reveal some significant differences of the lexeme Piter from other names of the city. For that purpose, the authors conducted an associative verbal experiment. As the stimuli, the experiment participants received four names of the city, St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, Piter. 550 respondents were asked to give an equal amount of associates to each stimulus. 11 percent of those had grown up in St. Petersburg, the rest had come there from other regions of Russia, 200 cities and towns in total. Having sorted the associates received from the respondents into lexico-thematic groups and analyzed those, the authors demonstrated differences between the four variants’ content planes and described the associative verbal plane of the lexeme Piter. Within the system of semantic relations built by the four toponymic variants, the meaning of the nomination Piter is formed by two contrapositions along the axes Past - Present and Formal - Informal. The variant Piter corresponds to actual, personal, emotionally significant experience. As mentioned earlier, that aspect of meaning is missing from the existing dictionaries that cover solely stylistic features of the lexeme and lack semantic peculiarities. As a result of their research, the authors suggest a draft dictionary entry Piter for dictionaries for cultural and country studies through linguistics. The entry’s structure contains the following elements: 1) headword; 2) grammatical labels; 3) definition; 4) examples of derivation; 5) use contexts (based on RNC and the authors’ research); 6) associative potential; 7) cultural linguistic commentary (result of the research). The authors declare no conflicts of interests.