Abstract
The article is devoted to the pragmatic properties of proverbs in dialogue. Proverbs, or axiomatic folk assessments of people’s experience, are used in dialogues predominately as argumentative support to this or that speech act of a speaker. The proverbs meaning adjusts to temporal and agent characteristics of speech act to make it more convincing when using a proverb as an argument. Sometimes proverbs can be used as indirect speech acts, combining both functions of speech act and its argument. The analysis of typical usages of proverbs makes it possible to reveal their pragmatics and thereby supplement the interpretations of proverbs in order to enhance their use in speech both by foreigners studying the Russian language and by new generations of native speakers of the Russian language. The statements put forward in the article are illustrated with six proverbs actively used in the modern Russian language pragmatic description: za odnogo bitogo dvuh nebityh dayut, klin klinom vyshibayut, vyshe golovy ne prygnesh’, posle draki kulakami ne mashut, nazvalsya gruzdem, polezaj v kuzov, s volkami zhit’, po-volch’i vyt’.
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