Word-building patterns of expressive nouns in the dialects of Transbaikalian Old Believers

The article deals with word-building patterns of expressive nouns in the dialects of Old Believers residing the Transbaikal region. Groups of expressive lexical units are distinguished according to the ratio of underlying stem and word-building formant to expressiveness. We have identified the most active ways of word-building for the nouns of these groups - suffixal and compressive, including nominalization, apocope; predominance of deverbative expressive nouns over nominal and adjectival ones. It is revealed that expressive nouns are more often formed according to word-building pattern “expressive stem + neutral suffix” without reference to the part of speech, to which the motivating word belongs. Neutral suffixes -ник /-ниц(а), expressive suffixes (diminutive, diminutive-hypocoristic) -очк/-ечк, and neglecting suffixes -ушк, -онк/-енк are more common in derivation of expressive nouns; suffixes -ул(я), -уг(а), -их(а) are less active in this process; other suffixes are found in individual word formative units.