Bashkir Proverbs and Sayings: The Problem of Differentiation, Analysis of Structural Patterns

Abstract

Introduction. Being an interdisciplinary problem, differentiation between proverbs and sayings remains an urgent and unresolved issue in both folklore and linguistic studies. Not only Bashkir and Turkic — even national and foreign — scholars have failed to develop any single viewpoint on distinguishing between proverbs and sayings. The article deals with a corpus of Bashkir proverbs and sayings. Goals. The work aims at analyzing and identifying key criteria for distinguishing between proverbs and sayings within Bashkir discourse. Materials and methods. The study investigates Bashkir folklore narratives and expedition materials published by the Institute of History, Language and Literature (Ufa Federal Research Centre of the RAS). The total number of proverbs and sayings studied to date is 12.197, of which 1.172 expressions are referred to as sayings (bywords). The entire collection of paroemias was subjected to continuous analysis. The research employs methods of semantic and contextual analysis, statistical method. Results. The article explores and identifies the following criteria for defining Bashkir sayings: a syntactically incomplete or complete sentence, semantic replenishment from speech contexts, generalization at the level of each specific situation, literal plan, a possibility (optional) of didacticism. The methodology developed by the authors for differentiating between proverbs and sayings in Bashkir folklore on the basis of works by foreign, Russian and Bashkir researchers makes it possible to present proverbs and sayings in separate databases within one folklore corpus. Analysis of sayings shows a significant quantitative predominance of syntactically and semantically complete constructs as compared to other structural patterns.

Keywords

• bashkir language
• turkic languages
• proverb
• saying
• folklore
• folklore corpus