Cultural Metaphors in the Folk Songs of the Trans-Vyatka Udmurts

This article deals with the study of cultural metaphors in the Udmurt language within the framework of cultural linguistics. The study aims to examine and analyze the cultural metaphors of the Udmurt language, especially those related to the concepts of river and forest/black forest. The study corpus consists of folk songs of the Udmurt diaspora living in the present-day Republic of Tatarstan and Mari El and in the Kirov region of Russia beyond the Vyatka River. The choice of this corpus is explained by the fact that folklore texts have a high linguistic and cultural potential. These texts are regarded as cultural codes that contain philosophical, ethnocultural, and psychological elements and reflect the collective experience of the people. The study’s relevance lies in the fact that the conceptual analysis of metaphors and schemata in Udmurt song folklore has not yet been investigated. As a result of the study, the following cultural metaphors were identified: River as suffering, river crossing as overcoming life difficulties, river as longing/grief, river as border/underworld, river as loss of youth, narrow riverbed as life difficulties, black forest as suffering, black forest as unknown/uncertainty, black forest as loneliness, black forest as border/underworld, and black forest as life difficulties. These conceptualizations are most frequently found in Udmurt wedding and guest songs as well as in songs dedicated to the farewell of brides and soldiers. The analysis of cultural conceptualizations has shown that different target domains can interpret the same source domain of a cultural metaphor. Conversely, different source domains can express one and the same target domain. The paper also attempts to show the connection between the emotional schemata of shyness and shame and the metaphorical models based on them, which represent the specific relationship between “man and nature” in Udmurt culture.

metaphor, cultural metaphor, cultural linguistics, conceptualization, cultural category, cultural schema