Denomination of spinsters and bachelors in Arkhangelsk dialects

Terms of kinship are closely related to the lexico-semantic group associated with gender and age denomination, as well as the group associated with the determination of social status. Everything considered a norm has a high social status. Married women and men, children born in marriage fall under the norm. A situation is considered normal when a woman and a man perform their functions in marriage well, i. e. they take care of each other, their children, elderly parents, the house; a woman lives in her husband’s house. Everything that is contrary to the norm receives a negative assessment. Accordingly, people who are unmarried for various reasons, i.e. single men and women, have a low social status in traditional culture: spinsters and bachelors, widows and widowers, divorced spouses; illegitimate children; children who have lost or never had parents (or one of the parents), i. e. orphans; childless spouses; a woman who had a baby out of marriage; women and men who poorly perform their functions in marriage (bad parents, bad spouses - for example, drinkers, adulterers); a husband who came to live in his wife’s house. The article analyzes denomination and motivation for denomination of spinsters and bachelors, i. e. people who have never been married or got married at an older age as compared to what is considered ‘normal’. For the designation of a girl who did not get married in due time, about 20 lexemes and 30 attributive combinations were noted in Arkhangelsk dialects. Accordingly, there were noted about 20 lexemes and one and a half dozen word combinations designating a bachelor. To denote a spinster, there are used the same lexemes as for denoting a girl of marriageable age: virgin, girl, maid, etc. Words that have a direct meaning in the age and gender category receive a different meaning after being transfered to the lexico-semantic group ‘Social status’. The same lexemes can be used in other meanings, for example, ‘a woman who had a baby out of marriage’. Word combinations or phraseological units may be a motivation for the formation of lexemes denoting a spinster. Noteworthy are parallel names: old/elderly maid ~ old/elderly guy; starukha, staritsa ~ starik, starets (derivedfrom the root ‘star’, which conveys the idea of being old); perestarok - for both men and women; kholostyak (which is explicitly translated as ‘bachelor’) ~ kholostovka, kholostyachka (feminine gender versions of ‘kholostyak’); bobyl’ ~ bobylka. However, this parallelism can be purely superficial: where a single man is concerned, the designations under study mean, as a rule, a guy who is not married yet; but when it comes to a single woman, the designations refer to a girl who has already missed the right time to get married. The change in the emphasis is very significant. The study is based on the material from published volumes of the Arkhangelsk Regional Dictionary, its card catalog and the author’s field notes.