Expressões idiomáticas do russo e do português brasileiro: um estudo comparativo de somatismos

Abstract

The phraseology of language has been the object of special attention from linguists from different countries since the beginning of linguistic studies until the present day. The need for language teaching and the development of translation studies led to the comparative study and consolidation of natural language descriptions. A comparative analysis of the vocabulary of different languages led linguists to relevant conclusions and opened new perspectives for the study of such colorful and expressive means of image creation as the idiomatic phraseological units used by speakers of different linguistic communities. These lexical items are imaginative and vary from one language to another, offering valuable information that contributes to an understanding of the cultural connotations about the themes expressed. In this sense, the purpose of this work is to present and discuss the structural and semantic characteristics of somatic idioms in Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, as these linguistic units represent one of the central types of phraseological units, as they present all the characteristics inherent to phraseologisms. The Spanish linguist Martínez López (1996, p. 198 apud MARQUES, 2006, p. 64) states that somatisms are “fixed expressions that use lexemes that refer to some part of the body, whether physical or psychic”. In this sense, the purpose of this work is to present and discuss the structural and semantic characteristics of somatic idioms in Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, as these phraseological units represent one of the central types of phraseological units. This study also aimed to discuss and understand the possible semantic and cultural differences and similarities of somatic idioms, that is, formed by parts of the human body, in this specific case: head, eye, tongue and foot/leg. As a rule, the meaning of these expressions is constructed from metaphors and, in most cases, to understand it, it is necessary to understand the culture and lifestyle of the peoples of each country, since the phraseological vocabulary reflects the worldview of a given society. From this perspective, phraseological units in Portuguese and Russian are of great interest, as they provide information about the culture and mentality of the two peoples. The data of this research were extracted from a lexicographical corpus and from authentic texts available on the Internet, from the Corpus Nacional da Língua Russa and from the Russian and Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries. The comparative study showed similarities and structural and semantic differences in the somatic idioms of the two analyzed languages. It is relevant to seek to scientifically compare and describe the idiomatic expressions formed by lexical items that name parts of the human body in Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, in order to observe the phraseological behavior in both languages. Are there any counterparts for all Russian expressions? Are morphological aspects similar? Keywords: Somatic Idiomatic Expressions; Brazilian Portuguese; Russian.