THE LINGUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GERMAN FOLK RIDDLE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the complex investigation of nominative and communicative organization of the German folk riddle (gfr) as a result of linguistic creative activity of the ethnos. The German folk riddle is a brief, allegoric description of any object or phenomenon which is represented by two speech genres – poetry and prose. Riddles possess those basic traits which are characteristic for folk-paroemic texts and namely parallelism, topology, question-answer unities which are common for formula folklore. In terms of prose and poetry genres a riddle is characterized by variety of its genre forms the most significant of which are puzzles, anagrams, crosswords, rebuses, jokes. They are quite represented in such folklore forms as fables-riddles, tales-riddles. The common feature of all these forms is the appearance of “traces” of evolution which moves in the direction from “serious” riddles to riddles-jokes. The peculiarity of the German riddles causes diffusion of features of several functional styles – conversational, literary and official. The riddle is mainly structured as simple and complex statement. As the riddle is first of all is a word-poetic way of the environment description, the priority place is given to the idea of life support to a person in his/her natural surrounding: nature (where a person exists) and material world (what serves a person). The socio-discourse space of the German folk riddle is determined by a stable set of dominants: HUMAN BEING, NATURE, THINGS, TIME-SPACE. For instance, the palette of plants and the palette of natural phenomena which surround people in their life world are widely represented in the German folk riddle. The communicative roles are distributed in the direction “theme-rheme”. As a rule, theme is embodied by the way of pronominal substitution and rheme by subjective word order where its initial position is acceptable.