Onomasiological Model of “Ethnically Alien” in One-Word and Compound Phytonyms in the Russian Dialects: Semantic Aspect

Resumen

The study examines the onomasiological construct of “ethnically alien” within both one-word (цыганки – tomatoes) and composite (немецкий имбирь – spotted arum) phytonyms found in Russian dialects. The corpus was sourced from lexicons of Russian dialects, botanical compendiums, and the author's individualized card catalog collected during field research. The methodologies include metalinguistic description, continuous sampling, component analysis, an ethnolinguistic perspective, as well as the technique for exploring a segment of a naive linguistic worldview and the approach of analyzing microfields. We have delineated nine distinct models of plant nomenclature grounded in either an ethnonym or an ethnonymic adjective, encompassing factors such as the geographical origin of the plant (канадка – a specific variety of wheat), its degree of toxicity (конопля турецкая – castor oil plant), surrogacy (шведский кофе – Astragalus boethianus), inferiority relative to more familiar agricultural products (китайские яблочки – a sort of small-sized apples), the external resemblance to an another ethnic group member (арап – black self-sown oats), and desire to assimilate novel flora into existing cultural paradigms (боб турецкий – Diospyros lotus), among others. Concurrently, ethnonyms within dialectal lexicons frequently undergo a loss of their literal significance, thereby manifesting the “in-group – out-of-group” binary dichotomy. Furthermore, within each geographical region, a unique assemblage of ethnonyms engaged in the nomination process exhibits variability influenced by historical, cultural, and interactional dynamics with other ethnic communities. The given study makes a significant empirical and theoretical contribution to multiple domains of linguistic inquiry, including dialectological semantics, ethnolinguistic theory, and lexicology of botanical nomenclature.