Abstract

In our article, we set ourselves the goal of studying the multidimensional presentation of the word bread as a part of French and Ukrainian proverbs and of analysing its lexico-semantic characteristics, scope and socio-cultural originality. Being an integral part of our daily life, bread presents itself first of all as a staple food, a vital element, but also as an eminently historical, mental and national object. The notion of ‘bread’ has evolved throughout the history of society, accumulating its own brands and specificities of identity, and expressing its own symbolism and emotional perceptions.

Proverbs as collective truths fixed in the national memory prove to be effective devices for comparative research. They serve as a source which allows us to wonder once again what are the cultural habits, the moral values, the spiritual judgments of a certain people, and also to see how these truths pass into the universal prerogative. Our interest comes first from the acknowledgement of the particularity of the proverbs relating to the notion of ‘bread’, both linguistically (form, structure) and semantically (content). We take into consideration the cross-linguistic influence and functioning of its typological characteristics in two languages, French and Ukrainian. This notion may seem simple or innocuous, but our study shows that it reveals an important lexico-semantic richness and a figuration of identity which illustrates similarities and differences between the two languages. Apart from its simplicity and wide semantic scope, this word is also characterised by the diversity of application at pragmatic, stylistic and cognitive levels.

The corpus of proverbs found in different lexicographical sources and on the Internet has enabled us to carry out a complex analysis which also includes the stylistic and cognitive characteristics of the word ‘bread’. The repercussions for the theory of translation is also an opportunity to observe how close the two versions are, that is to say, whether they cross each other via translation or lexico-syntactic equivalence, or if they require a transposition to complete any deficient semantics. Given the quantitative wealth of material, we have limited the thematic range to aspects of bread relating to religion, the notion of the 'Fatherland', natural phenomena, and some cultural traditions in the two countries. Our approach provides certain explanations of the expressive and cognitive particularities of the notion of bread through a comparative study of its presentation in French and Ukrainian.