The term tire (dash) in historical-linguistic and lexicographic retrospective

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the Russian term tire (‘dash’) and its parallel names in historiographical, etymological, semantic, functional and lexicographic aspects. The research is based on textual and lexicographic sources dating from the 18th to the 20th century, that allow us to establish the chronology of the term semantics and appearance of its parallel names. The purpose of the article is to clarify and systematize historiographical and etymological information about the term tire, to perform the historical-linguistic analysis of its semantics and functions, starting with the appearance of the first Russian grammars containing elements of a scientific approach to the coverage of linguistic facts. The article uses methods of historical-linguistic, definitional, etymological, semantic and lexicographic analysis. The dash in the function of the sign replacing the omitted parts of the utterance is found in Russian grammatical sources as early as the mid-1840s, but this sign itself does not yet have a name in this period. The terminological nomination tire, which is understood as a punctuation mark, presumably appears for the first time in 1802 in A German Grammar of I. Geym. The first lexicographic recording of the term is fixed in A Pocket book for lovers of reading Russian books… by I. Renovans and is dated 1837, however, in this case it is only about fixing the plan of term expression, but not the plan of its content, since Renovans understands the hyphen as a dash. The plan of term expression and the plan of its content begin to be unambiguously correlated in lexicographic sources, apparently, only in 1863, when in the dictionaries of K. Reif and V. Dahl, the dash in the functional-semantic aspect ceases to be associated with the outwardly similar hyphen. In scientific and theoretical sources, however, confusion continues to take place. The synonymous series including various names of the dash (molchanka as a silence
sign, small line, stop sign, line, thought-separating sign) is formed in the period from 1786 to 1831. The term dvoynoye tire (‘double dash’), judging by the results of the study, first occurs in 1902 in the work by A. Pridik, and not in 1955, as previously thought.

Keywords:

dash, double dash, term, historiography of the term, historical-linguistic analysis