Verbalization of the concept “old” in the English and Russian folklore linguistic worldview

The paper presents the results of the study of the vocabulary constituting concept ‘old' in the folk linguistic worldview based on the material of the English and Russian folk lyrics.The author makes an attempt to find ethnic peculiarities of this vocabulary taking into account the frequency of the words usage and their syntagmatic relations in the texts of the songs.The paper provides some examples of the chosen vocabulary functioning in the English and Russian folklore.The novelty of this study stems from the source material used – the paper is the first one to present a comparative research of verbalizing the concept ‘old' in English and Russian folklore texts.It is also relevant as it identifies certain specificity of the mentality of two ethnoses and figures out the ways of its reflection in the English and Russian folklore linguistic worldview.


Introduction
The interrelation between the language and the mentality of the people speaking the language has already been studied and proved by many scholars. The lexis of each language divides the extralingustic reality with its specific ways of referring to the same notions differently in different languages. At the same time, the national specificity of the language reveals itself in words. According to N.F. Alefirenko, behind the word in its acoustic or graphic form, there is a fragment of a living image from a particular ethnoculture [1].
The language of folklore has its cultural significance as it is a product of folk art and, at the same time, it reflects the social features of the society and the national worldview of the ethnos. Since the XX century such scholars as J. Bartminski, V. Propp and A. Сhrolenko have been elaborating on diverse theoretical and practical methods of researching folklore language [2][3][4]. It has been emphasized in their works that folklore is a creative reflection of our life and one of the ever-living sources of research on culture of any nation and invaluable matter for carrying on thorough investigation of national history, language, and mentality. The oral folk art contains the ethnic model of the people participating in its creation. The oral folk art is considered to be a reflection of historical and cultural realities. Folk songs can give important information about the language and the ethnos as their words, according to A. Сhrolenko [4], are determined by the people's way of life, outlook and national psychology, their culture and history.
We have already analyzed different fragments of folklore language in Russian and English folk songs and identified the ethno-cultural peculiarities of these fragments. For example, in our previous research we focused on the cluster "home" in Russian and English folklore lyrics and the representation of concept 'man' in English folk songs [5][6]. This article is aimed at studying the concept 'old' in English and Russian folk songs lyrics, with a focus on the frequency of usage of the words naming the concept and their syntagmatic relations in the texts of the songs. The main objective of the paper is to perform a comparative analysis of ways of verbalizing the concept "old" in the English and Russian folk lyrics. The object of the research is the vocabulary of the texts of English and Russian folk songs. There are many studies on the problem of verbalization of fragments of linguistic worldview based on different source material. For example, some of the latest research is devoted to the verbalization of the concept of "Vigilante Justice" in Agatha Christie's creative work; the cross-cultural overlapping of the emotion "grief and suffering" in the Russian and English languages; the verbalization of emotions in texts of economic mass media [7][8][9].
The novelty of this study stems from the source material usedno previous study has investigated the chosen concept in the texts of folk songs. The paper is the first one to present a comparative research of verbalizing the concept 'old' in English and Russian folklore texts. It is also relevant as it is necessary to identify certain specificity of the mentality of two ethnoses and to figure out the ways of its reflection in the English and Russian folklore linguistic worldview. The concept 'old' was chosen as a phenomenon that is a significant component of any nation's spiritual culture.
The research is conducted in keeping with the cross-cultural linguafolkloristicsa branch of folkloristics based on comparing folklore language phenomena of two or more languages [13].
The study requires a complex of research methods, both traditional linguistic ones and the method of computer aided text study [14], which is necessary to make up wordlists and identify the given lexemes and concordance sets.
The leading methods used were linguistic description and complex comparative analysis of the texts. The two methods implied direct observation on the lexis and selection, analysis, systematization of the factual material.
We also used the methods created by Kursk folkloristics school (such as the dominant and cluster analyses, and the application of the dictionary entries obtained as a result of compressing the concordances) [15].
The dominant analysis, the frequency of the word usage and the syntagmatic relations of the lexemes in the texts of the songs provided the information on what constitutes the concept 'old' in the English and Russian folklore linguistic worldview.

Results and Discussion
The analysis of the corpus of the English folk songs distinguished 376 cases of word usage of the lexeme old in combination with 91 words it modifies. In accordance with the object the adjective describes, we classified all the words into two groups: living beings and non-living things.
The results of the investigation allow us to conclude that the names of living beings constitute a bigger group of words described as old. The most frequently used lexeme among them is man with 66 word usages (w.u. It is necessary to mention that the lexemes naming the male human beings prevail over those naming females (lord (1 w.u.), farmer (1 w.u.), miser (5 w.u The common nouns were also divided into two groups: lifeless and animate objects. The lifeless objects are represented by the following lexemes: door (3 w.u.), bag (3 w.u There are several cases when the adjective functions in some offensive expressions: old bitch (3 w.u.), old whore (1 w.u.) and old devil (3 w.u The most frequent action associated with an old man is to marry, in most cases a young girl is made to marry an old man against her will, which brings her a lot of suffering.

Conclusion
Thus, the analysis allows us to conclude that the concept 'old' is inherent in both English and Russian folk songs lyrics. At the same time, the quantitative analysis showed the difference in the number of the word usage, which may indicate a different degree of importance of this phenomenon in folklore texts. We see that the common ground for two linguistic cultures is the old age of the character 'an old man', 'an old women', 'an old mother', 'an old father'. We can also notice that the English list of words is much richer and includes objects from different spheres of life. In the Russian folk lyrics, there prevails the substantivized adjective 'staryi', which is very rare in the English songs. The results of the observations and the analysis lead us to the conclusion about the cultural ethnic specificity of the studied concept in the linguistic worldview of two peoples.