The speech genre of letter in the discursive practice of a dialect language personality

The article aims to identify the features of Vera Vershinina’s mastering of the speech genre of letter and her personal characteristics as a dialect speaker: her level of culture and the system of values of a dialect language personality. The source of the material was the letters of Vera Vershinina, an Illiterate indigenous resident of Vershinino settlement located in Tomsk Oblast. The addressees were two dialectologists who for a long time studied the speech of this elderly peasant woman by the method of immersing into the speaker’ language environment. In the course of the analysis, the basic parameters of determining the speech genre identified by Mikhail Bakhtin (composition, topics and style) were used; models of speech genres by Tatyana Shmeleva and Natalya Lebedeva were partially applied. The letters of the Siberian peasant woman show that she insufficiently mastered the skills of competent writing; however, they demonstrate the development of the structure of the epistolary text (three parts of the letter with the main part framed by the etiquette beginning and ending) and its hypergenre nature. The beginning of the letter is written in the high style with frequent etiquette cliches; the main part in the everyday colloquial style; the ending is a mixture of styles. Compositionally, each letter as a hypergenre includes the genre of message and its varieties (explanations, instructions). Evaluative and imperative genres are used less frequentky. In some cases, hybrid simple speech genres are found. The topics in the main part of the letter are communicative failures in correspondence or communication, incidents in the village, health of the author and people from her settlement, events in their families, prices in stores, and weather. The topics vividly show the system of values of the dialect language personality, which she reports to the addressee. The disclosure of these topics reflects the the dialect language personality’s life values. The main purpose of the informant’s letters is communicative, which implies the preservation of communication. The latter, according to the Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, means information transition and exchange leading to mutual understanding, establishing both personal relations and the type of flexible social order. This purpose, which is somehow manifested in many fragments of letters, speaks of the need of the bearer of folk-speech culture for personal communication as one of the main values which her large family, numerous relatives, the settlement residents’ mutual assistance in collective work, joint participation in feasts and rituals formed and secured as the necessity and habit of constant communication. Strong friendly ties in the family, with relatives and friends create a sense of comfort and help in difficult life situations. Vershinina’s Insufficient literacy is compensated by the logic of thinking, her rich vocabulary, stylistic diversity, profound moral principles reflected in the letters she wrote.