Towards nominal variation of actively used Russian proverbs against the background of their actual Slovak proverbial parallels

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze the types of nominal variation in the Russian proverbs included in the new version of the paremiological minimum, against the background of their actual Slovak proverbial parallels. Russian proverbs in our material were obtained as a result of a sociolinguistic paremiological experiment in 2022 among the Russian native speakers informants. Slovak proverbs were recorded during another sociolinguistic paremiological experiment, among native speakers of the Slovak language. The basis for the experiments was the multilingual dictionary of proverbs by the author of this article. The results of both experiments are published in the textbook “Paremiograph Notebooks” (issues 3 and 8). The 2022 experiment was conducted on an Internet platform by teachers of the Department of Slavic Philology at St. Petersburg State University and included responses from 340 respondents. The experiment to identify common Slovak proverbs was conducted by us in 2003–2017 and has the answers of 100 Slovak informants. The research uses methods of sociolinguistic paremiological experiment, as well as descriptive and comparative analysis of proverbs. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time against the background of the Slovak language, the nominal variation of Russian proverbs identified during the specified experiment aimed at correcting the paremiological minimum of G. L. Permyakov in the 1970s was analyzed. Russian proverbs of the paremiological minimum of 2022 show the relevance of the variability of proverbs in the modern Russian language. The diversity of the types of nominal variation noted in our study in Russian proverbs shows the relevance of the variability of proverbs in the modern Russian language. Russian-Slovak proverbial parallels have common variant features that allow one to hypothesize that these proverbs belong to the Russian-Slovak paremiological core. The identified Russian-Slovak proverbial parallels can be used in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language for Slovaks and Slovak for Russian students.

Keywords:

nominal variation, proverbial parallel, Russian proverb, Russian paremiological minimum of 2022, Slovak proverb