On graphicfeatures in spelling codification of religious lexicon in the church dictionary by P.A. Alekseev

The research is held in the field of Russian orthographic norm studies, it deals with the issue of formation and dynamic evolution of the orthography in the history of the Russian language, in particular, it is aimed at observing codification and stabilization in spelling of the words that are referred to the confessional and terminological system of orthodox dogma, at distinguishing formation of spelling standards in religious style. The article presents some results of the linguatextological analysis of two editions of The Church Dictionary compelled by archpriest P.A. Alekseev in 1773-1779 and 1794 accordingly. The Church Dictionary is the first one in the history of Russian lexicography practice that collected and defined meanings for the words from religious sphere. Deep consideration of the data under study resulted in the following conclusion on codification features: the author stated morphological, traditional and phonemic characteristics, highlighted coordination between principles of spelling codification in The Church Dictionary and the previous works on lexicography and grammar. The cases of alternative word spelling were revealed, and their variability is explained as being associated with the graphic and orthographic spelling types (graphic and phono-morphological alternations in particular), as well as morphemic types with purely morphemic norms and morphophonemic alterations, and finally with the etymologic and word-forming types. The author offered his reasoning on word spelling variability fixed by P.A. Alekseev, that is, in The Church Dictionary two graphic fixation traditions are synthetized - cyrillic and laic, which helped to represent religious content