LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL DESCRIPTION OF THE STRUCTURE AND SEMANTICS OF TONGUE TWISTERS

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to consider the specific linguistic mechanisms, techniques and means of tongue twisters, which, when the text is updated, produce a game (usually comic, laughter) effect, indicating that the chosen strategy turned out to be successful and adequately perceived by the addressee (interlocutor).

The theoretical significance of the study lies in the analysis of the tongue twister genre in terms of its linguistic nature, clarification of the features of socially fixed stereotypes in usage of tongue twisters in everyday life, the nature of the structural and compositional organization and the content properties of this folklore genre.

The novelty of research is in that the author addresses the issue of constructing a cognitive model of a tongue twister. The main components of this model are the stereotypical (basic, invariant) situational scheme and its speech implementation (non-stereotypical linguistic code). The term “a game in a game” is proposed to determine the tongue twister phenomenon and it is explained as a holistic game linguistic complex (game text field) with multi-level game subsystems and elements.

The practical significance of the study is that the results of the analysis could be employed in updating the tongue twisters or creating new tongue twisters in order to meet realities of contemporary language and the needs of the contemporary language learners.

The following methods of the study were applied: study of theoretical literature; comparative analysis of material; morphological, lexical and phonetical analysis of tongue twisters.

The obtained results demonstrate that the existing morpho-derivative, phonetic and phonosemantic mechanisms and techniques of a linguistic game (LG) in a tongue twister have a constructive function of modeling the difficult-to-pronounce formal code of a tongue twister with specific linguistic means.