Image of the enemy in Russian phraseology and paremiology

Abstract

With the intensity of modern research devoted to the reconstruction of the linguistic world picture and cultural linguistics, such conceptual oppositions as “friend” – “enemy,” naturally, rose the scientific interest. The purpose of the study is a multifaceted semantic analysis of the concept “enemy” on the most complete Russian phraseological and paremiological material reflected in a three-volume dictionary. The corpus of these paremiological dictionaries includes the classic collections of Russian proverbs and sayings, extracts from the latest dialect dictionaries and the records made by the compilers. With this approach, the concept “enemy” receives a detailed description, taking into account the entire set of paremiological variants. This ensures the possibility of structural-semantic modeling of the analyzed paremiology, and the dominants of the concept “enemy” are revealed. One of the tasks of the analysis is to determine to what extent and in what way the semantic characteristics of the lexeme “enemy” and some of its synonyms are implemented as part of three types of paremias – stable comparisons (comparatives), sayings (resp. phraseological units) and proverbs. The revealed semantic dominants correlate with the characteristics of the concept “enemy” in explanatory dictionaries. The proposed analysis shows that the concept “enemy” and its lexemes constitute an active part of the Russian phraseology and paremiology. The word “enemy” (vorog), which forms the main part of this fund, preserves the ancient semantic impulses and is actualized in Russian paremias. At the same time, the semantic characteristics of the corresponding lexicon largely determine the connotative and axiological potential of proverbs and sayings. However, quantitatively and qualitatively, they are represented in them in different ways. On the one hand, such differences are observed in three different groups of Russian paremiology: in stable comparisons they are relatively few in number, in phraseological units they are semantically selective, in proverbs they are extremely active and multifaceted. Their imagery, reproducing both ancient and modern semantics and connotation of this concept, allows to reconstruct a bright and multidimensional “enemy image” in the mirror of the Russian language. © Mokienko V.M., 2022.