Categorization of Attitude to Reality in Paremiological Units

Abstract

The study deals with the proverbal semantics from the point of view of its attitude to the surrounding world as an object of cognition, evaluation, verification and verbalization. The aim of the study is to describe the main semantic types of paremiological units (proverbs) according to the criterion of “relation to reality” in empirical, axiological, ontological and logical aspects. The research was done on the material of proverbs in the Kalmyk language from the collection of V.L. Kotvich (1905). The author’s methodology of categorizing the semantics of the aphoristic units, and their differentiation into semantic types according to the criterion of “relation to reality” was used. It has been revealed, that in the proverbs all major aspects of aphoristic categorization of the reality are represented, according to which the proverbial semantics is differentiated into six categories: “nomological” and “centential” (In the empirical aspect), “truistic” and “gregarious” (In the axiological aspect), and also paradoxical (In the logical aspect) and absurd (In the ontological aspect). It has been established that the categorization of the attitude to reality in proverbs is characterized by different quantitative representation and content heterogeneity. The attitude to reality as an object of cognition and evaluation is represented to the greatest extent in proverbs, and to the least extent - as an object of verification. Proverbs of different semantic categories have a specific set of prototypes, concepts and images. The categorisation of the attitude to reality in proverbs is universal, but it is distinguished by selectivity in terms of its distribution in the semantic types and conceptual imagery, which represents the ethnolinguistic and cultural specificity of the categorisation and conceptualisation of the proverb picture of the world.