Expressions of Abstract Human Characteristics in Russian Sign Language: Towards a Dictionary

This thesis is devoted to the study of Russian sign language, in particular, the study of gestures that indicate abstract characteristics of a person. When studying the corpus of Russian sign language, Russian language dictionaries, and working with native Russian speakers, information about the presence, number, and use of various gestures related to this topic was analyzed. The features of gestures, the variety of existing gestures, and the presence of new ones were determined. It can be noted that there is a very large tendency in the Russian language to create new lexical units that are needed in the process of communication. There are many concepts that are reflected in several gestures that are very similar to each other. In addition, dictionaries do not contain a large number of gestures, so at present additional research is needed to compile dictionaries of the Russian sign language, of which this work is a part.