THE LANGUAGE AND STRUCTURE OF RUSSIAN FOLK NONSENCE TALES

Abstract

Nonsence tales in Russian folklore are a collection of prosaic and non-prosaic texts based on alogism and absurdity. The identification of a large array of diverse texts that can be defined as nonsence tales based on their substantive and formal similarities has led to the need to understand them as a kind of structural and semantic unity. Such attempts have been made by researchers repeatedly. As a rule, they considered nonsence tales within the genre category. This article shows that the unity of tall tales as a structural and semantic class of texts is ensured not so much by the genre paradigm as by the use of similar linguistic means. The author identifies the structural and semantic mechanisms underlying nonsense tales and shows how they function in various formal and stylistic varieties (song, prose, poetry) of these texts. The structural mechanisms of nonsense tales are based on the disruption of relations between different components of an utterance. These include metathesis (a technique involving the rearrangement of words within a phrase) as well as various violations of thematic-rhematic relations within an utterance, leading to logical and semantic incoherence. The semantic devices employed in tall tales are characterized by the disruption of lexical compatibility based on meaning. The article examines oxymoron, hyperbole, and litotes as key devices in this regard.