Local lexis in the works of classical writers related to Kostroma land: issues of normalisation

The problem of formation of the active lexical fund of the modern Russian literary language is considered in the article; it concerns its colloquial style; what serves as the source of the formation of the mentioned style, is the common people’s language of the late 18th century with its regional, slang, vernacular, folkish linguistic elements. Lexical and semantic processes that caused the changes in the national language at the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries are described; namely, intensive obsolescence of Church Slavonic language units with their replacement by lexemes from the main colloquial speaking usus of the epoch “before Alexander Pushkin”. The works of writers connected with Kostroma land, are analysed as significant sources of the study of the colloquial, including dialectal, word, as well as the history of the entry of such a word into the literary language. Part of the 18th century uncodified vocabulary, included in the fiction text, underwent semantic and stylistic processing, as a result of which the most relevant in semantic and stylistic terms lexemes became fixed in the colloquial style of the literary language; they would express the ideas about the spiritual and material world of great importance for the speakers of the language. In this respect, what deserves special attention, are particles. Not main parts of speech, particles are nevertheless considered to be additional, yet a highly significant component in the sentence structure, in a text with semantic interpretation; hence, they need a full complex synchronic-diachronic description. Thus, the particle авось («with luck»), which is the particle analysed by us in this paper, has passed a long way of normalisation and now belongs to the units that to this day constitute the lexical basis of the colloquial style of the literary language.