Linguistics and literary studies department

2.4 Proverbs and sayings with the realias of material culture
Everyday realias are represented in English phraseology by a group of proverbs and sayings, usually containing the names of dishes, drinks, monetary units, measures of measurement, etc.
The most common English lexical unit for food is pudding (“The proof of the pudding is the eating”, “Better some of a pudding than none of a pie”, “Scornful dogs will eat dirty pudding”, “As fit as a pudding for a friar's mouth "," The friar preached against stealing and had a pudding (goose) in his sleeve ", etc.).
In the proverb "To pick the plums out of the pudding" the English reality "pudding" realizes its specific meaning (by denotation) - the most common national Christmas dish among the British. A pototypical scenario is the following presupposition: Christmas puddings contained a lot of fruit. The human desire to eat the tastiest things first, which would have always happened if it had not been condemned by the moral canons of society, was initially based on a simple observation, which over time was figuratively rethought and led to the emergence of the metaphorical proverb “That pudding ", which implements the concept of" take the best. " Exactly the same concept is verbalized by the Russian proverb, which is also based on practical observation, " Снимать пенки (сливки)." This pair of proverbs can be considered functional and semantic equivalents due to the fact that the nouns that make up them are carriers of the classemes - "food" and that both proverbs relate to the field of cooking and nutrition. In English, pudding with plums is described, in Russian - milk topped with froths (cream). The discrepancy in the lexical composition of these proverbs once again proves that to express the same concepts, each people takes only familiar images and those signs that seem to him to most accurately reflect individual concepts. The selection of signs, phenomena and images directly depends on associations based on the characteristics of perception and segmentation of the surrounding reality. So pudding, being a familiar and often prepared dish for the British, reasonably became an object of figurative rethinking in English phraseology, but, being not familiar to native speakers of the Russian language, it was not included in Russian proverbs and sayings.
In quantitative terms, the main volume of lexemes-realias of material culture used by English phraseology as components consists of the names of monetary units and units of measure (weight, length, volume, etc.).
The English proverbs “An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory” (“Лучше немного практики, чем много теории”) «An ounce of discretion is worth a pound of wit» («Капля такта дороже потоков острословия») are examples of texts, containing realia-units of weight ("ounce" and "pound"), which are used not in their direct meaning, but metonymically - as a small and large number. The above proverbs have a structure inherent in proverbs, where there is a comparison of two qualities, things, properties, etc., when comparing which, a hierarchy of priorities is built. From the above examples, it is clear that the British put practice above theory, tact above intelligence. Background linguistic and cultural knowledge about the real ratio of ounce and pound (1 pound = 16 ounces) helps the recipient how to understand the associative mechanism of the occurrence of such proverbs, and explain the concept contained in the text - the quantity does not matter for moral values, positive character, etc.
Using the example of the proverb "Try to put a quart into a pint pot", one can trace that for adequate intercultural communication without any information loss, it is necessary to know the real values ​​of the measurements used in the proverbs, or at least have an approximate idea of ​​them. Otherwise, such phraseological units are perceived as unmotivated and the meanings “to try to do the impossible”, “to want the impossible” are inexplicable. Despite the fact that the lexemes-realias “quart”, “pint” do not realize their own conceptual meaning, the general class “unit of measure” and express the relationship between different levels of the hierarchical scale of measures, knowledge of the values ​​of these realias is necessary for a recipient of a foreign culture. Only with the help of information that a quart is a measure of the volume of liquid and free-flowing bodies in England, equal to 1.14 liters, and a pint is a measure of volume equal to 0.57 liters, one can easily restore the internal shape of the unit in question and trace its motivation. Accordingly, the reason for this categorization of reality by the English people becomes clear, which, to express the idea of ​​impossibility, gives very clear examples, using the measurement values ​​adopted in the country. A English proverb "Give him an inch and he will take a mile / yard", which verbalizes the concept of "greed, insatiability, has a Russian functional-semantic equivalent" Дай ему палец, он и всю руку отхватит " Both languages ​​use the same syntactical structures and lexically equivalent verbs as functional markers showing a similar course of thinking. In both languages, the comparison is along the line "small - large", "part - whole", but in Russian the lexical content of the proverb is done according to the scenario "part of the human body (in this case, the hand)", where the finger is one of the small and insignificant parts , in English - according to the script "measures of length, distance". Measures of length differ among the Russian and English peoples, therefore, the designations "inch" and "mile" mentioned in the English proverb are the realias of the English people, the presence of which requires linguistic and cultural knowledge to identify their internal form and, accordingly, to understand the associative links underlying the figurative implementation of the concept. In the proverbs of the two languages, the seme "very small" (in this case - a part) is put forward as the main seme of the words "finger" and "inch", and the words "hand" and "mile" ("mile") - seme “big” (in this case - all) The discrepancies of objects for comparison in the process of implementing the same concepts are explained by differences in the way of life of different peoples, which, in turn, is reflected in the national characteristics of the world perception. Therefore, to express the concepts of reality, each nation (regardless of other nations) chooses its own, close concepts for comparison, focusing on the recipient of its culture. So, the British to compare large and small use the measurement of land, which is very small in England. These realias - designations of linear measures (inch and mile) - at the first perception of the texts containing them indicate the nationality of these proverbs and sayings and, upon closer examination, explain the peculiarities of such segmentation of the real world by the British. The absence of Russian realias - designations of linear measures (such as meter and kilometer, etc.) - in texts equivalent to English proverbs and sayings, speaks not of their absence in Russian material culture, but only of the fact that for the Russian people this comparison does not carry a pronounced difference due to its less obviousness for representatives of the Russian-speaking linguocultural community, since there has always been a lot of land in Russia. In other words, the main categories of the linguistic picture of the world (in this case, the concept of small and large, part and whole) are inherent in every society, but they are perceived and filled in figurative units in different ways.