Publisher's Synopsis
This book offers a synchronic description of the dialect of a village in the western part of the Pskov oblast (north-western Russia). The dialects spoken there have long since attracted the interest of linguists. This is mainly due to features of the Old Novgorod dialect preserved in that area, such as the absence of the Second Palatalisation and cokan'e, i.e. non-distinction of dental and palatal affricates. The dialect of Ostrovcy shows a high concentration of such features. The book is relevant in yet another respect: it is one of the very few extensive descriptions of a Russian dialect. The description is based on fieldwork by the author in recent years. It concentrates on phonology, morphology and lexicon, but also gives an account of the most interesting syntactic and semantic characteristics.
