On the basic lines of proverbial studies in Russian paremiology

Abstract

The article summarises the principal achievements of domestic scholars in the area of proverbial studies, important both for the research on Russian proverbs and the analysis of proverbs in other languages. An important contribution was made by the introduction of the concept of the paremiological level of language and the detailed description of structural and semantic proverbial characteristics of a typological and specific nature, as well as the analysis of the similarities and differences between proverbs and phraseological word-combinations. Great significance can be attributed to the studies of the proverbial fund as a system and the introduction of the concept of the proverbial space, which permitted researchers to consider proverbs within a multi-dimensional continuum. An important line of research was the study of the pragmatic functions of proverbs and the proverbial variations, manifested in discourse and text, along with the experimental research into the knowledge and usage of proverbs by native speakers. Extensive theoretical and practical skills in the lexicographic presentation of proverbs, resulting in the compilation of numerous dictionaries, deserve special attention. The tradition of examining proverbs in the context of culture, and the results of studies on proverbial semantics in general, laid the foundation for cognitive and cultural-and-linguistic approaches to proverbial research, which have been developing significantly during the past twenty years, giving new dimensions to cross-linguistic proverbial studies.