Models of Toponyms in the Don Russian Dialects

The study of the structural-semantic features of toponyms opens up numerous opportunities for analyzing acts of naming. A model of a toponym includes both semantics and word-formation features. This article describes the ways of toponym nomination while considering the semantics of the toponymic base and its structural characteristics.
The material for this article was collected from the card catalog of the toponymic dictionary of the Don and Azov regions maintained by the Department of General and Comparative Linguistics at the Southern Federal University.
In this article, we examined toponyms and microtoponyms derived from substantivized adjectives. This is a fairly common model in the Don Russian dialects. Substantivized adjectives are frequently used when an important feature forms the basis of the nomination: names of plants growing in a particular area, characteristics of the bottoms and shores of water bodies, the nature of a riverbed, etc. The suffi xal method predominates in word formation models.
More commonly used words serve as the base for toponyms, but a dialectal feature is the suffi xal word formations from these bases. The study of the toponymy of the Don region helps us better understand the linguistic features of the Don
Cossack worldview and its origins.