Abstract:

Learning a foreign language is connected with reference to the culture and literature of the country of the studied language. This article is devoted to the use of modern technologies in the research of proverbs (paremias) from the transnational prose, created by the writers with the Czech or Russian roots. This paper is dedicated to the description of the main digital sources and methods of research in the field of paremiological studies on the basis of the Czech and Russian transnational novels (e. g., “Immortality” by Milan Kundera or “In search of a melancholy baby” by Vassily Aksyonov). The aim of the current research was to describe all the cases of proverbs usage, the form of their existence in the text and to estimate their stylistic potential. The mutual influence of several cultures and languages is reflected in such expressive units of language as proverbs. Moreover, in a number of cases authors transform paremias for stylistic reasons. These transformations cause the difficulties both in the identification of proverbs or their elements in the texts and in the attribution of the paremiological units to the certain language. The experience of this research gives clear understanding of the necessity of applying the international paremiological databases (e. g., “The Matti Kuusi international type system and database of proverbs” or “SprichWort-Plattform”), national corpora of the Czech, Russian and other languages, the direct survey (sociolinguistic paremiological experiments) among native speakers via virtual platforms (e. g., Google Forms), Scholarly Bibliographic Databases (e. g., Web of Science, Scopus or eLibrary.ru) and others. The authors demonstrate how such an approach promotes the construction of the students’ skills of complex research analysis during the process of preparation of their Master’s Thesis.

Keywords:

Digital sources, paremiology, proverbs, transnational prose, Czech, Russian.