THE IMAGE OF A BAKER IN GERMAN PROVERBS AND SAYINGS: SYMBOLIC ASPECT

Abstract

The article reveals the semantic characteristics of a baker’s image in German proverbs and sayings. The choice of the research material is determined by the pragmatic peculiarities of the paroemiological corpus: proverbs and sayings actualize didactic and worldview representations of an ethnos, they reflect the basic axiological orientations of culture. In the course of contextual and semantic analyses of paroemias with components Bäcker and backen, the researchers identify the macro-fields verbalizing the symbolic characteristics of a baker’s image in the German culture. The study of research material allowed to obtain the following results: texts of proverbs with components Bäcker and backen represent themes of wealth, high income, material prosperity, competition, greed, thievery, trouble, labour, hard working conditions. In German linguoculture there is an ironic attitude to representatives of this profession: they are identified with millers, tailors within the motifs of ‘thirst for profit’ and ‘thievery’; a baker is associated with the theme of inevitable reckoning for the consumption of freely given resources. In general, the image of a baker is constructed on the basis of metonymic and metaphorical reinterpretations of bread: the motif of bread selling was developed into negative characteristics and qualities of a baker, while the process of making bread creates positive features, connected with the theme of labour.