Cross-cultural aspects of Russian and Latin American idioms

Abstract

Idioms have aroused the interest of linguists around the world for over a century. From Logan Pearsall Smith (1925), Vinogradov (1946, 1947), Cacciari and Glucksberg (1991), and Fernando (1996), to other contemporary authors such as Kvetko (2009), Negro Alousque (2011), E. Piirainen (2015), C. Ce and S. Chornobay (2016), to mention but a few. Many of the studies of idioms carried out in the last years have analysed idioms from different perspectives and approaches. The present paper aims to contribute to the cross-linguistic analysis by identifying similarities and differences in idioms in Spanish and Russian languages with an active component. Material includes idioms from 19 Latin American countries as samples of the Spanish language as an attempt to bring the Latin American phraseology into this research field for the first time. The author concentrates on the semantic specifics of these idioms based on the hypothesis that they have some similarities regardless of how geographically distant the two regions are from each other, and that their differences lie only in cultural aspects.