Lexicographic image of women and ways of verification of dictionary stereotypes

The functional-semantic field ‘Behavior’ consists not only of predicates, but also subjects of behavior - human nominations (anthroponyms) with the general meaning of ‘a person who behaves / acts in a certain manner’. In addition to individual traits, typical manners and styles are realized in behavior, which, along with other conditions, depend on the gender of the subject. As our article demonstrates, female behavior is reflected in the linguistic consciousness of the speakers of the Russian language as a complex of negative stereotypes. These stereotypes are represented through the expressive nominations of women (‘feminitives’). The "Explanatory Dictionary of Women's Names" by N. P. Kolesnikov served as the lexicographic source of such units for this article (to recreate the cultural and historical context, Russian paremia, as recorded by V. I. Dal, were also involved). On the basis of the semantic classification of vocabulary feminitives, the cumulative behavioral image of women is obtained through a set of stereotypes that, undoubtedly, reduce and simplify the diversity of female images and characters and probably distort the real state of affairs. To correct the results obtained on the basis of the dictionary, various verification methods were used: checking for usability, taking into account the quantitative indicators of word usage, identifying generic correlates, analyzing their use in speech, monitoring the contextual transformations of emotiveness and the value of expressive feminitives, etc. Several stages of verification of the vocabulary allowed us to correct the stereotypical image of women as subjects of behavior, to bring it into correspondence with the speech reality and extralinguistic reality. The latter in particular can be judged by the reflections extracted from texts of a different genre nature, which are conceptual statements about women, their role in the family and society, their typical traits and gender specific traits (the latter, as a rule, are evaluated against a background of comparison with traits which are traditionally considered to be typically masculine). In our article, special attention is given to excerpts from the (currently unpublished) memoirs of N. A. Lukjanova, one of the major researchers of expressiveness in the Russian language and Siberian Russian dialects and a highly respected teacher at the Novosibirsk State University. Her memoirs offer an impressive and poignant look at the fate and lifestyle of Russian women in the XX century and provide interesting language material that perfectly serves the purpose of our study.