Linguoculturological commentary in polylingual dictionaries of proverbs

Abstract

The article examines the principles and content of a culturally oriented commentary on proverbs in comparative dictionaries. It substantiates the specifics of the linguoculturological commentary as a tool for the comparative description of proverbs in a multilingual dictionary. The methodological basis of the study is the provisions of the proverb theory reflected in the latest publications that consider proverbs as elements of the language and as a variety of aphoristic units, linguoculturological analysis of proverbs, their differentiation according to the degree of national specificity / commonality with other languages and the principles of reflecting such differentiation in comparative paremiography. Based on the material of Russian proverbs “about a fool” and their counterparts in certain Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages, the possibilities of linguoculturological commentary in identifying and dictionary representation of the national specificity of proverbial semantics are shown. Actually, the choice of this group of proverbs and languages of comparison is random, which significantly increases the representativeness of the study, makes its results deliberately objective, since in this case they can be extended to any groups of proverbs in any languages. The article formulates the main principles of the linguoculturological commentary in a polylingual dictionary: firstly, the proverbs of both the input language and the output language should be commented equally; secondly, proverb commentaries in all languages must be relevant (it means that volume, structure, subject orientation and depth of commenting should be the same for each language); thirdly, the most significant components of proverb content and form for the interlingual comparison should be the subject of commenting; fourthly, commentaries should be given separately for each proverb of each language, however, in terms of content, they should be projected onto each other. At the same time, in multilingual paremiological dictionaries, the interlingual linguocultural projection is of particular importance. The linguoculturological commentary in the proposed form will significantly increase the volume of a polylingual dictionary of proverbs; however, it will also significantly increase its representativeness and cognitive value both in the proper linguistic and cultural terms. The prospect of the research is to develop the structure of a culturally-oriented commentary in a polylingual dictionary of proverbs, ways of correlated commenting on their linguistic semantics and background semantics, methods of including linguoculturological commentary in various zones of a lexical entry, as well as determination of the system of paraverbal means of its representation in polylingual paremiography. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.