Towards a linguistic vision of the world at the paremiological level of language

Abstract

This article examines the thematic groups of the Russian paremiological minimum of Grigoriy Permyakov, and its reflection in various foreign paremiological corpora, to support the idea of the specifics of a linguistic picture of the world at the paremiological level of language. The authors’ collections of Slavonic proverbs from 2000–2019 are utilized. The work applies the approach of contrastive paremiological studies promulgated by Valeriy Mokienko, in order to demonstrate the systematic characteristics of the paremiological level of expression: polysemantic, currently synonymous (70 groups) and antonymous (30 groups) Russian proverbs. Some proverbs are found in several synonymous and/or antonymous pairs: from our database, the total number of proverbial synonyms is 195 out of 500 proverbs, and of proverbial antonyms 83 out of 500 (as a result, approximately 39% of our Russian paremiological minimum are in a synonymous relationship and approximately 17% of proverbs are in an antonymous relationship). The authors conclude that the synonymous proverbs appear in all 12 groups of our thematic classification of Russian proverbs and the antonymous Russian proverbs appear in 10 thematic chapters out of 12. It is proposed that the thematic subgroups, containing synonyms or/and antonyms, are the dominating segments of the Russian proverbial representation of the world, which highlight the most important sides of the Russian conception of life embodied in proverbs.