Image of Fisherman in Khanty Narrative: Colloquial Means in Structure of Fictional Text

The article is devoted to one of the aspects of the cognitive part of reconstruction of the human image in the Khanty language. The key task was to identify a mental image of a Khanty person and an adequate description of this person in a text. This task required studying the linguistic means in two aspects: paradigmatic (or static) and syntagmatic (or dynamic). After defining the key concept (Khanty = fisherman), the author conducted a search for keywords defining a person rooted in the native land. Based on the dialectological dictionaries of the Khanty language, the author compiled a list of these definitions, including six lexical units, as well as a list of lexical-semantic variants for defining and evaluating a person. The study concluded that the structural and semantic features of these units, embedded in the dictionary as potential, are fully manifested in a text, contributing to the complete realization (verbalization) of the concept. The textual analysis is based on the story of the founder of Khanty literature, Grigory Lazarev, "Sorneng tov" ("The Golden Horse"). The story describes life in a small fishermen’s village; the main characters are three generations of one family: an old fisherman, his son and grandson. Careful reading allows identification of means employed by the author to develop the characters as fully as possible. It is clear that the author, Lazarev, strives to describe the characters extremely accurately. He succeeds, especially with the direct speech of the characters. The words and phrases that describe and evaluate a person are also found in the story’s narrative and descriptive fragments. There are also commonplace phrases and expressions that are not typical of the Khanty language. This is explained by the imperfection of the Khanty language in its written form (insufficient development of the Khanty literary language).