Lexical and semantic peculiarities of the dialect words pertaining to the body parts (based on the Arkhangelsk dialect)

The article is concerned with lexical and semantic peculiarities of the dialect words pertaining to the body parts. All dialect words (about 50 examples) have been taken from the Arkhangelsk dialect which seems to be a unique linguistic phenomenon belonging to the Northern Russian dialects - a manner of speaking that includes the language of pomors spoken on a vast territory of the Belomorye region. The main objective is to find some differences and similarities based on the corpus of vocabulary. The dialect words pertaining to the parts of the body are selected successively meeting some inclusion criteria, i. e. nouns of masculine, feminine or neuter gender in the Nominative case singular, sometimes in combination with an adjective and with no taboo usage. They are compared and contrasted with the purpose of spotting some differences and similarities as well. Four groups are distinguished, each one having a particular set of examples and demonstrating the main lexical and semantic peculiarities. The first group consists of dialect words that fully coincide with the existing Russian words including some variants and derivatives formed with the help of the suffixes or that at least have the forms which can be understood by the native speakers in spite of some differences in morphemes. All these dialect words illustrate close relationship with the original Slavic language where they all come from. The second group consists of some ‘borderline’ cases when a dialect word has morphemes making it close to the name of the body part or when the root morpheme coincides with the root morphemes in other parts of speech. With some instances of letter transposition and some interesting examples of synonyms it turned out that these dialect words are quite numerous. The third group incorporates dialect words, or ethnographisms, which are typically dialectal in the sense of their unique form, which is difficult to guess and to derive. One more fact is worth mentioning while analyzing dialect words in this group: different sources interpret this or that dialect word differently. The fourth group is made up of dialect words which have a different meaning compared with the corresponding Russian word. A number of instances of stress, including root vowel accentuation, instances of numbness and graphic changes, changes of the consonants and root vowels are marked.