E-mail: lnv36@yandex.ru Tel.: +7 (495) 938-17-80
32a, Leninskii av., Moscow, 119334, Russian Federation
DSc in Philology, Leading Researcher, Department of Ethnolinguistics and Folklore, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
This article examines the issue of what meaning is put into the concept of “motif” by the compilers of indexes of the semantic units of various genres of folkloric texts. The whole history of the study of the folkloric motif has been devoted to traditional texts of narrative genres; as for so-called non-narrative motifs, which form the basis of the “small” genres of folklore (beliefs, charms, dream interpretation, etc.), it remains unclear how to isolate them from the textual structure. In addition to narrative motifs, there may be formulas which carry the meaning of imperative orders, threats, or curses, and there are also other ways of expressing the semantics of prompting to action, including incantation; magical dialogues; texts with the motif of “decreasing count,” etc. Accordingly, all these varieties of textual structure should have their own special ways of isolating motifs for the purposes of cataloging them. Using the example of Russian indexes of mythological stories and “small” folklore forms, the author shows how the structural and semantic characteristics of the motifs of narrative stories and non-narrative genres diverge, and comes to the conclusion that folklorist-practitioners, when systematizing accumulated texts, may become hampered by the terminological limits of “plot — motif.” It seems that some additional units of a structural and semantic nature are needed.
Meletinskii E. M., Neklyudov S. Yu., Novak E. S., Segal D. M. (1969) Strukturnoe opisanie volshebnoi skazki [A Structural Description of a Fairy Tale]. In: Trudy po znakovym sistemam [Works on Sign Systems]. Iss. 4. Tartu: TGU. Pp. 86–135. In Russian.
Neklyudov S. Yu. (1984) O nekotorykh aspektakh issledovaniya fol’klornykh motivov [On Some Aspects of the Study of Folklore Motifs]. In: Fol’klor i etnografiya. U etnograficheskikh istokov fol’klornykh syuzhetov i obrazov [Folklore and Etnography: At the Ethnographic Origins of Folklore Plots and Images]. Ed. by B. N. Putilov. Leningrad: Nauka. Pp. 221–229. In Russian.
Neklyudov S. Yu. (2004) Motiv i tekst [Motif and Text]. In: Yazyk kul’tury: Semantika i pragmatika. K 80-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya akad. Nikity Il’icha Tolstogo [The Language of Culture: Semantics and Pragmatics. To the 80th
Anniversary of Nikita I. Tolstoi’s Birth]. Ed. by S. M. Tolstaya. Moscow: Indrik. Pp. 236–247. In Russian.
Putilov B. N. (1993) Motiv [Motif]. In: Vostochnoslavyanskii fol’klor: Slovar’ nauchnoi i narodnoi terminologii [East Slavic Folklore: Dictionary of Scientific and Folk Terminology]. Ed. by K. P. Kabashnikov. Minsk: Navuka i tekhnika. Pp. 156–157. In Russian.
Putilov B. N. (1994) Fol’klor i narodnaya kul’tura [Folk and Folk Culture]. St. Petersburg: Nauka. In Russian.
Silantev I. V. (1999) Teoriya motiva v otechestvennom literaturovedenii i fol’kloristike. Ocherk istoriografii [The Theory of Motif in Russian Literary and Folklore Studies: A Historiographical Essay]. Ed. by E. K Romodanovskaya. Novosibirsk: Izdatel’stvo IDMI. In Russian.
Silantev I. V. (2004) Poetika motiva [The Poetic of Motif]. Moscow: YaSK. In Russian.
Vinogradova L. N. Folklore Motifs of Narrative and Non-Narrative Genres: The Practice of Compiling Indexes of Plots and Motifs. Traditional Culture. 2022. Vol. 23. No. 1. Pp. 155–163. In Russian.