The Linguistic World-Image Of The Medieval Slavs Through The Phraseological Prism

Abstract

Phraseological units of Old Church Slavonic language are in the focus of the authors’ attention. These word complexes keep valuable information about the linguistic world-image of the medieval Slavs in the era of blending Christian perception of the world with the pagan one. The purpose of our research is to reconstruct the main fragments of the linguistic world-image. Sacredness, commonness for all the Slavs and cultural value are the fundamental traces of the Old Church Slavonic language which determine semantic nature of more than 4500 set units. All Slavonic manuscripts of the 10th –11th centuries (including east-Slavonic) have become the materials for this study. The authors used synchronous and diachronic approaches in this study. They applied comparative-historical and liguoculturological methods, component and contextual analysis and confirmed the conclusions with statistical data. The analysis carried simultaneously with the work on “The big phraseological dictionary of the Old Church Slavonic language” allowed the authors to get certain results. 1. After Christianization the linguistic world-image of the medieval Slavs has changed. 2. The transformation of the linguistic world-image could go a) due to appearing of new ideas, notions and concepts, such as “The one God”, “God’s grace”, “Martyrdom”, “Self-sacrifice”, “Kingdom of Heaven”, “Christian church”, “Monkhood”, “the Day of Judgment” or b) due to enlarging and reinterpretation of the old well-known concepts, such as “Family”, “Love”, “Honor” and etc. 3. New set units were created according to Slavonic models, and their components were mainly polysemants from the common Slavic lexical fund