Variability of the genre of autobiographical story in dialect and literary-colloquial speech (on the material of Saratov dialectological corpus)

The article examines the specific features of how the genre of autobiographical story functions in dialect and literary-colloquial speech. The study is conducted on the material of Saratov Dialectological Corpus and dictaphone recordings of native speakers of the literary language of the corresponding age group. The characteristics of the autobiographical story common to dialect and literary-colloquial discourse were determined, and the factors influencing the functioning of this genre were identified – the level of communicative competence, correlation with the genre of autobiography in business communication, interviewer’s questions structuring the story. In conversations with native speakers of the literary language, a successful implementation of the communicative task was observed – to build an autobiographical story in chronological order. In the autobiographical stories of dialect speakers, the chronological principle was often violated, the narration was chaotic: a story about childhood or youth was suddenly interrupted by memories of adulthood, an assessment of the current situation, and again returned to the past. A chronologically and event-consistent narrative in dialect discourse is most often determined by certain features of the informant’s linguistic personality, for example, the experience of publicly telling about one’s life. A typical autobiographical narrative of a dialect speaker is characterized by subjectivity (in accordance with the principle of egocentricity of dialect narration) and fragmentation, reflecting not all biographical stages, but the most important biographical points for the informant. In the text corpus, one can trace the repeated reproduction of such key moments with minor variations in the records of one informant of different years. The retrospective nature of the autobiographical story often contributes to the actualization of the strategy of self-presentation and self-identification. It was revealed that the strategy of self-presentation of speakers of the two speech cultures has a similar nature; in self-identification, the professional principle is the leading one for speakers of the literary language, and the local and generic ones – for dialect speakers. Thus, the variability of the genre of the autobiographical story is determined by both idiolectic, personal factors, and functioning in different types of discourse – literary-colloquial and dialect ones.