Maria L. Kovshova

Professor, Doctor of Science (Philology), leading researcher of the Department of theoretical linguistics of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

(Moscow, Russia)

Olga S. Orlova

junior researcher of the Department of theoretical linguistics of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

(Moscow, Russia)

Abstract. The article deals with riddles as signs of language, mind and culture in the framework of cognitive and culturological studies. The focus is on the ways of categorization and conceptualisation of the world in riddles, the research of the ways of representation of different types of information in these signs. The paper is concerned with the semantic structure of riddles and the development of cognitive and culturological comments. The examples of folk Russian and English riddles are used to demonstrate how the cognitive comment represented in a table shows the structure of a riddle metaphor, and how the cultural comment serves as a means of decoding of different types of linguistic and cultural information preserved in riddles, which forms the semantics of riddles.
Keywords: riddle, semantic structure of riddles, denotation, image, frame, metaphor, cognitive and culturological comment.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Kovshova, ML, Orlova, OS. 2020, ‘On the semantic structure of riddles. Cognitive and culturalological comment as a means of research’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 4 (4), pp. 70–79, URL: http://tula-vestnik.ru/pdf/2020/vipusk_4_29_12_20.pdf (in Russ.)

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