Сognitive-Discursive Functions of the English Language Paremiological Units

Abstract

The article deals with the paremiological units of the English language and their cognitive-discursive functions. The paper presents arguments in favor of the study of paroemias in discourse that are due to the principle of functional self-organization of the language, as a result of which, a new synergistic meaning is formed and the importance of paroemias seems obvious for increasing the pragmacommunicative effectiveness of discourse. In the article, the authors state that the language synchronous state is inherent not only in the system, but also in dynamism, and the evolution in the language is not only dynamic, but also systemic in nature, therefore among these properties is the ability of paroemias not only to have a stable initial visual form, but also to carry out evolutionary transformations which initiate new variants of the structural-semantic character. The work also examines paremiological units as precedent texts acting as a recurrent fragment of any discourse. The work focuses on the following properties of parоemias: they represent precedent concepts; express emotional significance for speakers of a particular linguistic culture; are a unique system of associative relations caused by a precedent in the native speaker’s consciousness; have a clear productive and perceptual marking in functional terms; are precedented cultural signs that indicate the semiotic nature of the subject, its active participation in the process of communication and its relationship with the national complex of cultural knowledge; present a truncated discourse behind a text or a situation; are units of linguistic consciousness actualized in discourse. The main goal of the article is to describe a number of cognitive-discursive functions of paremiological units: the function of the structurally-explicational organization of the discourse; the emotional-semantic emphasis function; the generalization function; the stylistic function; the regulatory function; the euphemization function; the phatic function; the meaning variability function.