Structural and Semantic Analysis of Common and Generalized Food Names in the Selkup Language

The article presents a comprehensive study of the vocabulary of common and generalized food names in the Selkup language, which has not yet been the subject of a linguistic description. The study made it possible to identify and systematize common or generalized food names, clarify the period of their formation, carry out a morphosyntactic analysis of the lexemes, examine their word formation activity, determine the capacity for semantic derivation, determine the internal form of complex and compound lexical units, to identify common and generalized food names and their derivatives, to analyze sentence expressions with the component denoting a common and generalized food name, to carry out a contextual analysis of common and generalized food names on the material of household texts. The author used research methods such as descriptive analysis, comparative historical analysis, component analysis, and quantitative analysis. Selkup language dictionaries served as sources for the Selkup language. The work of leading linguists on the etymology, phonetics, and grammar of the Selkup language enabled us to carry out a comprehensive analysis. As a result of the research carried out, it was found that the common and generalized names of food in the Selkup language go back to the verb stem *ǝm- ‘to eat’ from the common Samoyed period of formation. Twenty-six dialect variants of common and generalized food names were identified in the modern Selkup language. They have different morphosyntactic structures: simple non-derivatives (10), simple derivatives (14), and compound names (2). The lexemes studied have a polysemy based on metonymic transference. Nouns (9) and compound names (13) are also formed from the stem *ǝm- ‘eat,’ which denotes objects and phenomena directly or indirectly related to food. Most nouns are represented by simple derived lexemes (7), but one complex word and one word formed by transformation have been identified. Compound names can be bipartite (11) or tripartite (2), consisting of an adjective or adverb and a noun.

food names, Selkup language, structural and semantic analysis, vocabulary of traditional foods, indigenous language