Structural and semantic features and national specificity of English and Russian proverbs with the meaning "foresight", "caution".

Abstract

The subject of this study is the structural and semantic features of English and Russian proverbs with the meanings of "foresight", "caution". Proverbs with the meanings "foresight", "caution" have not been sufficiently studied in terms of revealing their meaning and describing their structural and semantic characteristics. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the general and unique meanings of English and Russian proverbs of this thematic group were considered in a comparative aspect, as well as an analysis of syntactic structures and a semantic analysis of the lexical components of proverbs and an analysis of figurative and expressive means reflecting their national and cultural identity were made. The results of the study can be used in the process of teaching English, as well as the basis for a deeper comparative study of the proverbs of the two languages of this thematic group. The study used descriptive and comparative methods, functional-stylistic analysis, structural and syntactic analysis. In the course of the analysis, we revealed the following pattern: in most of the presented thematic groups there are proverbs close in meaning that are not equivalents. They use the same syntactic structures (imperative sentences, complex sentences with subordinate conditions, time clause, subordinate concessions and subordinate attributive clauses, syntactic compression: ellipsis, incompleteness of sentences, non-conjunction, as well as complex sentences with an adversative meaning) and similar expressive techniques (antithesis, comparison, oxymoron, tautology, allegory, metaphor, including personifying metaphor), while differing in lexical content (emotional and expressive, evaluative vocabulary, vocabulary associated with the realities of everyday life, zoonyms, somatisms, archaisms). These differences are due to the peculiarities of climate, life, traditions, as well as the environment of their occurrence, which, on the one hand, indicates the universality of human experience, and on the other hand, indicates the national specificity of the thinking of the two peoples.