Lyudmila B. Savenkova

Professor, Doctor of Science (Philology), Professor of the Russian Language Department

Southern Federal University

(Rostov-on-Don, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2023-3-179-194

Abstract. Among the semantic markers of generality, scholars distinguish negative pronouns. In Russian paremiological space there are about 400 proverbs and sayings with pronouns nobody, nothing, nothing (никто, некого, ничто, нечего, никакой). The article investigates the range of functions of pronominal negation in potentially didactic sayings, and offers a general overview of different usе of negative pronouns as parts of paremias. The author focuses on the analysis of units with the pronoun nobody. The peculiarities of its semantics and possibilities of functioning in the roles of semantic subject and semantic object of the sentence are considered. It is revealed that the subject position is twice as frequent as the object role. At the same time, the combination of the pronoun nobody with the predicate indicates the predominance of the propositional semantics of the reliance on the event proposition, while predicative parts embodying the logical proposition are found much less frequently. The analysis demonstrates that due to the pronoun nobody, paremias describe either the equivalent impossibility of any proceeding, achieving a goal, etc. for any individual (nobody in general), or the opposition of an individual to the rest of the society or a small group (nobody is any person from among those potentially able to interact with an individual). In most cases, the pronoun nobody implements a particular negation, reinforcing the general one, which is conveyed by a predicate with a particle or prefix. However, there are also constructions in which the incompleteness of the sentence does not allow explication of the general negation through the predicate (then the pronoun additionally takes over this function). In isolated cases in paremiological space, complete sentences with a general negation expressed through a non-negative predicate are used.
Keywords: paremia, saying, structure, semantic subject, semantic object, negation, negative pronoun, empty set, compatibility.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Savenkova, LB 2023, ‘The Range of Functions of Pronominal Negation in Russian Paremics’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 3 (15), pp. 179–194, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2023-3-179-194 (in Russ.)

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