Materials for the Dictionary of Northern Russian lamentations. Composite lexical units

The paper deals with the language of the Northern Russian lamentations collected and
published by E. V. Barsov 150 years ago. This collection is valuable as a major folklore
source and a corpus of authentic texts in Olonets dialect. The paper focuses on composite
lexical units (binomials in the first place) formed from two (or rarely three) words. Inner relationships
between members of binomials, which provide their derivational, grammatical, and
semantic unity, are explored. A lexicon of binomials (over 800 units) is presented which may
serve as a base for further research on the language and poetics of folklore as well as on
Northern Russian dialect lexis.