On the problem of classifying vocabulary naming the actions of the household spirit (based on Russian mythological texts from the Perm region)

The paper substantiates the need for developing an electronic dictionary of the Perm region’s mythological vocabulary. An attempt is made to create a fragment of the ideographic part of this dictionary for the units that name the actions of the spirits-‘owners’ of loci. This presents a certain difficulty since there is no generally accepted classification of the actions of these characters in modern ethnolinguistics and folklore studies. Such a classification in our electronic dictionary is based on the scheme for describing a mythological character presented in the work of L. N. Vinogradova and S. M. Tolstaya On the Problem of Identification and Comparison of Characters in Slavic Mythology (Moscow, 1994), and on the classification proposed by L. N. Vinogradova in the monograph The Mythological Aspect of the Slavic Folklore Tradition (Moscow, 2016). In the dictionary being developed, it is supposed to divide all vocabulary denoting the actions of demons into two groups: the names of actions directed at a person and those not directed. The vocabulary of the former group is planned to be placed in the ‘Functions’ section, which will have five subsections: ‘Harm’, ‘Help’, ‘Punish’, ‘Predict’, ‘Show affection for a person or cattle’. The words of the latter group should be included in other sections: ‘The character’s behavior’ (which will have three subsections: ‘Sound manifestations of the character’, ‘Visual manifestations of the character’ and ‘Typical actions of the character’) and ‘Properties and abilities’. The proposed classification does not claim to be exhaustive since it is based on the vocabulary describing only one spirit (household spirit). However, the computer form of the dictionary allows us to easily modify and supplement the ideographic part, which will make it possible to create a classification that best reflects all the features of the Perm mythological tradition.