Phraseological Units with the Word “Bread” in Russian, Frenchand Italian Linguocultures

Abstract

Language is not only a means of communication between people, but also the cultural memory of the speakers of this language. We believe that in linguistic units there is cultural information that indicates the existence of a category that correlates language and culture, and makes it possible to describe their interaction. A way of verbalizing a culture using linguistic signs is called cultural connotation. Cultural categories are a kind of stereotypes, symbols, standards, mythologemes, archetypes, rituals and other signs of both national and universal culture. The linguistic picture of the world is one of the key concepts that characterize the peculiarity of the relationship between people and the world around them, because “captures a certain image of the world, which is never a mirror image of the world”. The national specificity is revealed in phraseology most of all. It is the phraseological composition of the language that most fully reflects the features of speech behavior, the specificity of the national mentality, manifested through cultural codes. The phraseological image is essential in modeling the linguistic picture of the world of a particular people. In this article, the subject of research are Russian, French and Italian phraseological units with the word “bread” from the point of view of linguoculturology, which allows us to identify the national-cultural identity of the phraseological units under consideration. We believe that the internal form of the phraseological unit contains a certain cultural code, that is, with the help of phraseological units it is possible to characterize representatives of one or another nationality. The subject of this article is a comparative analysis of phraseological units that have the word “bread” as the main component. The object of research is the features of the use of this word as a fragment of the lexical and phraseological systems of the Russian, French and Italian languages. The article compares phraseological units with the “bread” component, which historically goes back to free phrases, analyzes the processes of rethinking both the whole expression and its components. Using the example of phraseological units, we will analize how the lexeme “bread” loses its literal meaning “food” and acquires a new content, introducing new meaning into the semantic structure of the phraseological phrase. The problem under study is very relevant, because it is caused by the growing interest in modern linguistics to study of the mechanisms of secondary nomination in different languages and the identification on the material of phraseological units of specific features of verbal thinking and perception of the surrounding reality by language groups.