FEATURES OF OPPOSITION SEMANTICS OF UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH PAROEMIAS WITH COMPONENT BETTER THAN…

Abstract

The paper deals with the oppositional-comparative semantics of Ukrainian and English paroemias with a lexical marker of comparison better than. Comparison as a basic factor of opposition accumulates a system of beliefs, values, ideas about reality, preserves the idea of the linguistic picture of the world, in particular national thinking, ethnic mentality, life wisdom and experience, analysis and cognitive perspective of a person’s perception of the surrounding reality. The implementation of the comparative-oppositional semantics of the studied paroemias is achieved with the participation of the necessary set of key components in the structural-semantic composition of proverb: a) at least two elements that are compared in direct or metaphorical understanding; b) syntactic marker of comparison, opposition; c) a quantitative marker as a semantic enhancer of the content of paremia, sometimes a generalized implicit or explicit expression. At the syntactic level, the studied units tend to impersonal structures of generalized obviousness. Structural comparative-oppositional models have been outlined as follows: 1) A (sometimes absence of A) is better than B, oppositional semantics is implemented on comparable phenomena, facts, events of generalized reality; 2) any A is preferable to the absence of any B; 3) two (several) A is better than B with an explicit quantitative indicator; 4) one A is better than several (two) B with an explicit quantitative indicator. It has been determined that the paremia fund of Ukrainian and English, using verification units of comparativeoppositional semantics, testifies to coincidences in the representation of the imagery of the picture of the world in relation to the phenomena of the surrounding reality, social activity, behavioral etiquette, preservation and transfer of historical experience of generation, etc. Unproductive discrepancies have been traced both in the communicative orientation of the studied paremias and in the shades of oppositional comparison.