METAPHORS AND SIMILES: FORMAL MEANS OF EXPRESSING SIMILARITY

This article discusses Russian grammatical structures that express the relation of similarity, which underlies a variety of metaphors and similes presented in literary texts. The list of constructions was made on the basis of the “Materials for a dictionary of metaphors and similes in XIX–XX century Russian literature”, Volume 1 “Birds” and Volume 2 “Animals, insects, fish, snake”, in which the type of grammatical structure serves as one of the parameters describing comparative tropes. Two main groups of structures are “Metaphor” and “Simile”. The group of metaphors includes riddle metaphors (Yu. I. Levin), genitive metaphors, metaphorical renaming constructions, metaphorical periphrases and identification constructions. The group of similes includes comparative constructions without explicit an basis of comparison (with different words that express similarity) and those with an explicit basis of comparison, which can be expressed by a verb, an adjective, and — less frequently — by a predicative, an adverb, or a noun phrase. Appositive similes comprise another type of simile. The classification of comparative tropes according to grammatical constructions, on the one hand, helps to clarify the scope of the terms metaphor and simile, clearly distinguishing them. On the other hand, in the lexicographic project examined here such a classification allows us to trace the how the formal expression of relations of similarity evolved in the language of Russian literature. Identifying the bases of comparison in comparative constructions allows us to see the semantic basis of the figurative characteristics inherent to various realia.