Verbal codes of culture in proverbs about social relations

The aim of this article is to identify the specifics of using various verbal codes of culture (plant, zoological and material) when transmitting the norms of social relations in Russian proverbs. The empirical material consisted of 544 proverbs about social relations with units of the codes selected from three collections of proverbs. At the first stage, proverbs were selected that met two conditions: (1) they interpret relations between members of society at the level of deep semantics; (2) they use in the text units of the plant, zoological and material codes, and fix the meaning of these units as a component of their surface semantics. At the second stage, social relations interpreted in the selected proverbs were typified, and the quantitative ratio of proverbs using each code to interpret each type of social relations was established. At the third stage, the correlation of deep semantics and surface semantics of proverbs of each type was analyzed; the code functions of the units under consideration were determined; and, based on their generalization, the principles of implementation and functions of plant, zoological and material codes for the interpretation of each type of social relations were revealed. The conducted research allowed us to conclude that the functions of verbal codes of culture - plant, zoological and material - differ due to the peculiarities of their structural and content organization in the interpretation of social relations in a proverb. 1. Each of the considered types of the verbal code of culture is focused on the interpretation of social relations of a certain type, recorded in the deep semantics of proverbs: the plant code on the norms of "parents - children" relations, the zoological code on a wide range of relations; the material code on the "husband-wife" relations. 2. The surface semantics of units of various verbal codes of culture in the deep semantics of proverbs about social relations mainly establishes a connection with different aspects of these relations: mostly with their participants in units of the plant and zoological codes, and with the instruments of their interaction in units of the material code. 3. In the deep semantics of the analyzed proverbs, cultural meanings of different levels are more pronounced in the code semantics of nominations of plants/their parts, zoonyms and nominations of objects: the content of the genre subcode in units of plant and material codes, mostly general cultural semantics in units of the zoological code, but in proverbs of the same content types (fixing the norm of children's character traits "inheritance" from parents) zoonyms also belong to a special genre subcode that unites them with nominations of plants/their parts. 4. The most diverse is the semantics of proverbs about the social relations "husband-wife", presented with the help of the material code, since the basis for transmitting the norm in them is a wide range of functions of objects in human life and many of their physical properties. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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