მეტაფორული ანდაზების სემანტიკური კლასიფიკაცია და მათი ფუნქციური თავისებურებები ანგლოფონურ კულტურაში

Abstract

The paper considers proverb as a specific type of a short didactic folk text, presented in a fixed, rhythmical and easily memoizable form, which contains a piece of unanimously acknowledged wisdom, morals and traditional views gathered throughout centuries from the life experience of its creators, and which is passed from generation to generation mostly in an oral way. Metaphoric proverbs express folk wisdom through the juxtaposition of heterogenous concepts on the basis of their common features understandable for everyone in the given ethno-culture. The research revealed that metaphoric meaning of the proverb is realized in two forms: a) in the form that of the metaphor proper, which implies latent comparison of heterogenous concepts, and b) in the form of simile which is explicitly real-ised with the help of comparative constructions better ... then, worse ... than, as good ... as; as ... as, etc. We conducted linguo-cultural analysis of the metaphoric proverbs denoting the concepts of love, friendship, home and family relations. Our research has shown that the semantics of these proverbs usually contain positive evaluative properties, though there are some exceptions, when these conceptual proverbs bear negative connotations. Positive proverbs usually encourage listeners, while negative ones rebuke. It should be noted, that a proverb’s negative or positive evaluative essence is revealed either through its components or the contextual analysis of the proverb. The contextual analysis of metaphoric proverbs in fictional writing revealed two types of their functioning in the text: a) usual, when the proverb is used in its systemic, widely accepted meaning; and b) occasional, when the traditional meaning of the proverb is subjected to some semantic changes acquiring specific, individual meaning under the influence of a particular context. As a result, a proverb may shift from one semantic class to another or its evaluative essence may be changed from that of the positive one to negative, and vice-versa