Traditional perception of the dog according to Russian paremiology

Abstract

The aim of the research is to establish the traditional perceptions of the dog in Russian linguaculture, using the material from V. I. Dal's ‘Proverbs of the Russian People’. The article identifies various characteristics of the animal (appearance, behavioral traits, human-dog relationships, comparison of dogs with other animals, etc.) that served as sources for folk sayings about dogs. It conducts a lexical-semantic and quantitative analysis of animal nominations, interprets the literal and metaphorical meanings of proverbs. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the reconstruction of the mid-19th-century image of the dog based on proverbial texts, including previously unstudied riddles, reflecting the perception of the animal in the collective consciousness of the Russian people. Dog features are classified into three aspects: 1) the dog as a domestic animal; 2) the dog and humans; 3) the dog and other animals. Proverbial units are interpreted as cognitive structures containing condensed information about the phenomenon of reality. The study proves that the linguo-cognitive interpretation of folklore texts of small genres allows for the reconstruction of a relatively complete image of the dog as a specific fragment of the Russian linguistic worldview.