Cultural Codes: The Semantics of Bread in English Proverbs and Sayings

Abstract

An anthropological character of the language is one of the most current research paradigms of linguistic culturology. Within the mentioned aspect, language is considered a system of signs to which a group of people ascribes certain meanings in accordance with the specifics of their world perception and processing. Proverbs and sayings are texts that contain didactic and cultural information on values and representations of different ethnic groups. Traditional nature is the key feature of folklore texts, and in this context paroemias can be investigated as cliches that include culturally explained signs or codes, combination of which forms the language of culture, structures and estimates the reality. The aim of the paper is to reveal semantic characteristics of a gastronomic word ‘bread’ in English folklore on the examples of proverbs and sayings. The objectives were the following: to study the texts of paroemias with the component ‘bread’ and its synonym ‘loaf’; to determine semantic groups (macrofields) defining functional, axiological and mythological aspects of bread; to identify traditional representations verbalized in English paroemias. To obtain the aim of research we applied the methods of contextual, semantic, semiotic and interpretative analyses; the complex of applied methods allowed revealing key symbolic meanings of the basic food in English folk texts. In the course of the study we obtained the following results: in paroemias there is a mythologem of the bread alone and spiritual bread; we found some texts verbalizing a topic of punishing for sins by hunger; gastronomic code ‘bread’ reflects the elements of archaic and domestic traditions of England as well as realia, euphemisms and superstitions; bread serves an instrument for comparison, a symbol of Christian religion denoting the God’s gift; bread is the main attribute of wellness and poverty, labour and idleness, it represents basic demand in food and material values in the life of a human-being.

Keywords

• the english language
• paroemia
• proverb
• saying
• cultural code
• gastronomic word
• bread
• semantic groups
• metaphor