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The paper is timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the birth of Valery M. Mokienko, Doctor of Letters, Professor of Slavic Philology, Philology Department, St Petersburg State University, Honorary Chairman of the Phraseological Commission of the International Committee of Slavists. The paper reviews focal areas of the scholars research, lists his academic interests, the main of those being phraseology and phraseography. V.M. Mokienko proposed to detect dynamic interactions of contradictory properties of the phraseological system, to reveal the mechanism of phrase formation involving broad genetic and typological parallels to determine the nature of a phraseological unit. The method of structural and semantic modeling based on a detailed comparison of dialectal, Slavic and non-Slavic European idiomacy is the basis of modern theoretical and practical studies of the scientists followers. The trilogy of dictionaries edited by V.M. Mokienko distinguishes precise certification of units, references to synonymous turns, which makes it easier for the reader to navigate in the huge source material, outlines the parameters of the phraseological space close to the certified expression, and makes it possible to show the wealth of images of folk speech conveying the same semantics.

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A study of the methods of speech transformation for common language units shows that any language creativity, even the most inventive and unusual, relies in its methods on the cumulative experience available in the arsenal of native speakers. The paremiological space of the language, which is a set of all proverbial units that reveal the most diverse types of relationships among themselves, also includes a number of units of other levels — typical syntactic and logical structures, stable binomials that serve as the basis of proverbs, proverbial fragments with semantics assigned to them, and generalized ideas implemented by several units of the language of different lexical content and grammatical model. The language game, which embraced the sphere of paremias in the post-Soviet era of “carnivalizing” the language, manifested itself in the formation of new units according to existing models (Luchshe dlinnaia zhivaja ochered’, chem korotkaia avtomatnaia), in contaminations (Baba s vozu — volki syty), in the replication of countless versions of occasional endings for ordinary paremias (Ne pliui v kolodets — prigoditsia pliunut’; … vylezet — ne prokormish’), semantic deciphers (Deti tsvety zhizni, no ne nado davat’ im raspuskat’sia), etc. The focus of article is the sphere of language transformations of an expression with structure that allows for varied deviations from the usual form, for example the paremia Chem dal’she v les, tem bol’she drov according to the dictionary “Anti-proverbs of the Russian people” (2005) and Internet materials. Examples of the intentional deconstruction of habitual paremias show that destruction does not occur, since the proverbial form and logical-syntactic model of a common proverb appears in new units and even part of the neologism continues to be the bearer of its meaning, enriched with occasional semantic additions.