Methods of the Diachronic Analysis of Author’s Proverbs of the Russian Language: the Possibility of Application

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to present the author's method of the diachronic analysis of author's proverbs of the Russian language and the possibilities of its practical application on the example of the analysis of the author's proverb Don't get in the someone's arsenal with your own machine gun. The principal novelty of the research is that a complex method of the historically distant author's proverb analysis was developed, tested and presented for the first time. The method is based on the achievements of modern scientists in the field of synchronous study of author's proverbs and their system prototypes, structural paremiology, research of the Russian language of the revolutionary era, facts of the national history of the beginning of the 20 th century. The developed method is presented in the form of a sequence of 7 stages of the analysis, allowing to describe the structural and semantic transformation of a proverb; to scientifically justify the recognition in a new proverbial unit of the source proverb by establishing the commonality of their reference to one of the 4 higher logical and semiotic invariant groups; to interpret the facts of a wide extralinguistic context, which led to the emergence of a new proverb; to formulate the opinion expressed by the author's proverb and to establish its type. The paper demonstrates the possibilities of the technique practical application by the example of analysis of the author's proverb mentioned above.