The thematic group ‘food’ in the vocabulary of dialects at the upper reaches of the Nepryadva river

This article studies the thematic group ‘Food’ in the dialects of the area located at the upper reaches of the Nepryadva river. Food, as well as the arrangement of the dwelling, household items, folk costumes, is part of the everyday culture of the people. The material for the study was an array of unique lexemes collected in filed research in five settlements of the Volovsky district of the Tula region. Since ancient times, population of this area has been engaged in various activities, crafts, trades. In the course of the study, we identified lexical units that denote the names of foods, meals, and drinks. The entire array of tokens was grouped into 6 thematic subgroups. The lexical units were described from the point of view of semantics; the motivational features of their denomination were determined. The collected material was compared with data from a number of lexicographic sources such as dialect dictionaries and dictionaries of the modern Russian language. It should be emphasized that, despite the persistent tendency to leveling, dialectal lexical facts related to the thematic group ‘Food’ continue to exist in modern dialects. The analysis of the lexemes made it possible to single out among them: unique lexemes that are not presented in dialect dictionaries or in dictionaries of the modern Russian language; semantic dialectisms; lexemes whose meaning is close to the literary one; lexemes found in dialect dictionaries in similar meanings; lexemes that are noted not only in the dialects of the territory under study but also in Ryazan dialects, in the identical or similar meaning. The studied content of this thematic group and the lexical units included in it require further scholarly reflection.