Semantic features of Russian dialect verbs denoting animal and bird voices (based on «Lexical atlas of Russian folk dialects»)

The article is devoted to the semantics of Russian dialect verbs denoting animal and bird voices, in particular, methodological aspect of semantic description of lexical units included in «Atlas of Russian Folk Dialects». The author analyzes the differences in the semantic volume of such verbs distinguishing two types of synonymic rows: 1) rows consisting mainly of verbs with broad semantics (e.g. verbs denoting the songbird, magpie and bear voices); 2) rows of verbs with mainly narrow semantics, referring to specific species (e.g. the wolf, elk, cuckoo, goose, black grouse, crane). In addition, the cases in which there are no special verbs for the designation of some wild animal and bird voices are described (in such cases, the meanings are expressed by verbs of broad semantics or verbs which usually refer to pets or poultry). Finally, the author deals with the gender- and situation-related semantic differentiation of verbs denoting the voices of the same type of living beings.