Everyday prohibitions and prescriptions in the speech culture of the Perm old believers

The article considers set expressions with connotations of prohibition and prescriptions recorded in the speech of the Old Believers of the Perm region. These prescriptive statements reflect the worldview of representatives of the Old Believers’ culture and the value system of the religious society as well as serve as a means of its representatives’ self-identification. Particular attention is paid to the expressions that organize everyday behavior. The investigated expressions as a speech genre contain explanations for the basic categories of human existence and the rules of conduct. The reflected system of prohibitions and prescriptions is connected with human spirituality: religious origins retain their leading role in life and its practices and often take the form of its hyper-sacralization. Verbal prohibitions and permissions are mainly based on the opposition ‘my own’ - ‘someone else’s’, where ‘my own’ is associated with the right, proper, just behavior, whereas ‘someone else’s’ - with the opposite (from the Antichrist). Deviant behavior is estimated as sinful: in prohibitions and prescriptions lexemes ‘sin’ and ‘wicked’ are used at a high level of frequency. The analysis of the studied materials shows that expressions of prohibitions and prescriptions demonstrate a high level of preservation despite the fact that in modern conditions some norms have lost their relevancy (they either have been reduced or have completely disappeared) and the existing rules have been weakened. The expressions recorded in the speech of the Perm Old Believers mostly correlate with the prescriptions of the Old Believers from other territories of Russia. At the same time, they are evidently different in their component composition and artistic features (rhyme and rhythm that are often created by dialectal vocalization and folk and etymologic parallels). The explanations of existing norms and rules (narratives of an interpretational character) are not identical either. Therefore, prescriptions have their own local specificity typical of the Perm region, which manifests itself mainly at the lexical level.