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AGRICULTURAL AND WEATHER-LORE ENTITIES IN LANGUAGES OF DIFFERENT STRUCTURE: FOLKLORE OR LINGUISTICS

N. Fattakhova, M. Kulkova, N. Fedorova

Abstract

Agricultural and Weather-lore is a unique monument of folklore. It accumulates practical wisdom of people, experience gathered during the centuries and carefully passed on from generation to generation. It has been proved that agricultural and weather-lore is closely linked with customs, amulets and talismans. The aim of this article is to reveal whether we can take agricultural and weather-lores for linguistic units. This question has appeared because many scientific investigations have been made devoted to various kinds of lores. The material for this article consists of agricultural and weather-lore entities in three structurally and genetically different languages: inflectional Russian and German, Indo-European languages, and agglutinating Tatar, a Turkic language. We have touched upon the problem of future prediction, because every agricultural and weather-lore consists of a conditional situation and the predicted situation. The notion of condition takes one of the central places together with such notions as action, property, time, cause, purpose, and others. The unceasing interest to conditional structures is in no small part determined by the plausible hypothesis according to which conditional structures present a sort of the clue providing the opportunity to solve some of the mysteries of verbal and cogitative human activity. РЎonditional structures are universal, as they are represented in all languages of the world. In Russian, they have been investigated thoroughly both as a separate type of sentence and as a kind of the general category of conditionality. In this article we identify formally syntactic types of conditional-temporal structures in the compared languages, singling out structurally semantic and functional characteristics to solve the issue of typifying the structures under examination, establish the semantic, pragmatic, communicative features of determining structures, the preferred usage of certain patterns in the compared languages, single out the content structure in terms of interaction between grammatical meanings, as well as syntactic and non-syntactic connotations (modal, logical, and others). At the end of the research we come to the conclusion that among the formally syntactic types of lores in Russian and German there are complex sentences, conjunctionless sentences, simple sentences; in Tatar these are complex linked sentences and simple sentences. So we confirm that agricultural and weather-lores can be explored as independent linguistic units because they have typical structures common to differently structured languages.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2014/B31/S8.002

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