Russian and English folk riddles about animals

Abstract

Folk riddles have recently become a fairly popular object of linguistic and linguocultural research due to their complex structural and semantic organization, which allows analyzing this folklore genre in semantic, structural and functional aspects. This study explores the description features of wild and domestic animals within the framework of an enigmatic text. The object of our research is to identify the presence of linguistic and cultural connotations in the description of wild and domestic animals and to trace the degree of taboo in using animal names in folk riddles. The tasks set are due to the fact that an archaic person’s life was largely connected with agricultural activities carried out with the help of livestock, as well as the need to protect themselves from wild animals attacking livestock. During the analysis of the linguistic material, we found that Russian and English folk riddles about animals were characterized either by omission of the subject of action in the descriptive part of the riddle, or the introduction of occasional vocabulary, which is largely consistent with the laws of taboo. In the Russian folk riddle, an occasional noun of this type is often introduced for the name of an animal: stuchikha (someone knocking), gremikha (someone rattling), with a rather transparent semantics that actualizes the initial action: (stuchat' – stuchikha, gremet' – gremikha). In the corpus of English folk riddles, we have noted a conversion transition (the verb lick transforms into the noun lick), as a result of which the noun also develops the meaning of the subject of a given action. In addition, we found the absence of a linguocognitive component in the description of animals, since the description of the denotation is mainly based on the actualization of a typical feature (the ability to bark, the presence of a certain number of hooves, horns, the ability to hunt animals).