TYPES OF PROVERBS AND SAYINGS AND PRINCIPLES OF THEIR CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the multidimensional analysis of the idiomatic corpus of a language with the consideration of the structural, semantic and linguocultural aspects. A special attention has been paid to the fact that proverbs and sayings reflect a life style, geographical location, history and tradition of a nation that is a bearer of a certain culture. A language idiomatic corpus represents a system of values, social morale, worldview, self-understanding of a nation and its perception of other people and nationalities. National values, traditions and norms of behaviour are encoded in the idiomatic funds of national languages and their decoding and comprehension are of a paramount importance for a successful cross-cultural communication in the modern globalized world which requires profound background knowledge of the participants of communicative processes. As to the distinctive features of phraseological units, scholars point out national and cultural peculiarities that are defined by the following factors: the objective one which is expressed in the natural and cultural realia of a nation, and the subjective that includes the choice of language means in various languages to express the same phenomena and realia. Cultural specificity is caused by the elements of the material or spiritual culture of a society, its history, traditions, and natural geographical peculiarities. In the linguistic sphere there are several principles of the classification of proverbs and sayings. They can be based on the key words (lexical or encyclopedic), alphabet, thematic group, place and time of the compilation of the dictionary of proverbs, genetic feature (the origin of a language and nation). An alphabetic classification prevails in the majority of English and Ukrainian dictionaries of proverbs but the alphabetic principle of classification causes the variants of one and the same proverb to be placed in different places. At the same time the conducted analysis has shown that a thematic classification of proverbs is the most popular one as it proves the relevance of language units to various aspects of human activities in the most accurate way. On the basis of another feature of proverbs – their translatability – proverbs and phraseological units were divided into three groups: the ones that have equivalents in other languages, can be translated descriptively or accompanied by additional historical cultural comments and explanations.