Substandard elements in dictionaries of standard language

Abstract

This paper deals with non-standard (substandard) linguistic units in Russian speech and their description in existing dictionaries of standard Russian, e. g. the word tselka ‘hymen; virgin (girl)’ and such words as bliad’, blia and blin in their interjectional and parenthetical use. It makes use of corpus data (in particular, data from the Russian National Corpus) and shows that their lexicographic descriptions often do not account for their use in speech. The paper makes special reference to lexical units that have both standard and non-standard meanings. In particular, it discusses the meaning and usage of the Russian verbs dat’ / davat’, konchit’ / konchat’, trakhnut’ / trakhat’, and trakhnut’sia / trakhat’sia. Non-standard meanings of these units have only recently received lexicographic descriptions. All these words deserve a thorough semantic and syntactic analysis (in particular, their government patterns should be carefully studied for each particular lexical meaning). The relation between standard and non-standard readings is idiosyncratic in each case and also should be taken into account. The paper aims to show that the descriptions of the words under consideration (not only descriptions of their nonstandard meanings but descriptions of their standard meanings as well) in existing dictionaries often require revision. It outlines ways of improving their lexicographic descriptions.