Paroemias “wolf’s sun” and “sun of wolves”

Abstract

We consider the combinations of the periphrastic nature of “wolf’s sun”, “wolf’s sunshine”, “sun of wolves”, “sun of wolf”, which are used to name the night time image in the titles of the television shows and poetic texts. We establish that periphrases for naming the moon are used in order to interest readers, listeners, viewers; to avoid tautology; to inform (clarify or notify additional knowledge about the time of day), to characterize the moon and focus on certain signs of the time of day, to reflect objectively the author’s emotional and subjective assessment of the text. We reveal that the analyzed artionymic units occur as a result of the creative individual process of artionymization – the transition of common nouns into the category of proper noun – artionym. The names of the moon by means of paroemias “wolf’s sun”, “wolf’s sunshine”, “sun of wolves”, “sun of wolf” reflect both positive and negative connotation. If the “wolf’s sun” symbolizes lovers time, the night luminary characterizes by positive semantics, as evidenced by the diminutive form “sunshine” in the paroemia “wolf’s sunshine”. If there is a night-time theft or the girls do “night affairs”, the image of the moon takes on a negative characteristic. We note that in the Chinese linguistic study, periphrasis is not considered as a separate lexical and stylistic category, which makes it very difficult to translate Russian paroemias into Chinese.