2020, Vol. 11, No. 3. - go to content...

Permanent address of this page - https://sfk-mn.ru/en/30flsk320.html

Метаданные этой статьи так же доступны на русском языке

Full article in PDF format (file size: 328.7 KB)

For citation:

Kosharnaya S.A. [Myth as a metaphor] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2020, Vol. 11, No. 3. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/30FLSK320.pdf (in Russian).

Myth as a metaphor

Kosharnaya Svetlana Alekseevna
Belgorod state national research university, Belgorod, Russia
E-mail: kosharnaja@bsu.edu.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4541-3979
РИНЦ: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=354860

Abstract. The objective of this work is the problem of reconstructing the mythological picture of the world through the analysis of language units, which becomes particularly relevant in the context of understanding the ethno-cultural origins of the national mentality and causes a special interest in the vocabulary of the people, which provides both the implementation of the nominative needs of native speakers, and is the result of metaphorical, symbolic, artistic interpretation of being. The research Russian (in retrospect – East Slavic) mythological picture of the world is of undoubted interest in this respect, since the mythology of the Eastern Slavs has not been preserved as a set of texts (in contrast to ancient mythology), but is reflected in folklore and the language picture of the world of the people. A characteristic feature of the mythological type of culture was that the surrounding reality, reflected in the language semantics, often acquired the meaning of a symbol.

Despite the conventionality of symbols, it is based on the epistemological operation of comparison as an archaic principle of reflection of reality that underlies the mentality of carriers of mythological consciousness. Based on the fact that symbolism is based on the likeness of heterogeneous objects of reality, we can assume that the metaphor is a kind of «methodological» – cognitive – base of the mythological picture of the world.

Based on the fact that archaic vocabulary (both proper and common names), representing the mythological picture of the world, often at the level of semantic archetype demonstrates the result of metaphorical transfer, it can be argued that, establishing the parallelism of real and/or illusory reality, mythological consciousness relied on the epistemological operation of comparing sensory representations that arise when perceiving various objects of reality, which is reflected in numerous cases of metaphorical overlaps and intersections of conceptual and semantic areas, permeating the language and culture from ancient times to their present state.

Keywords: myth; mythological picture of the world; language picture of the world; metaphor; symbol; semantic archetype; mythonym

Download article in PDF format