THE PHENOMENON OF KNOWLEDGE IN TRADITIONAL FOLK CULTURE

The article examines the semantics of the all-Russian verb to know based on the material of Arkhangelsk dialects. This verb forms the center of semantic domain ‘knowledge’, which occupies an important place in popular culture and defines its cognitive originality. In the studied dialects, the verb to know covers a large area of meanings, which in clude ‘to know’, ‘to understand’, ‘to consider’, ‘to assume’, ‘to be able’, ‘to remember’, ‘to experience’, ‘to comply’. The semantic space of the verb to know is determined by the logical contiguity of these meanings and, consequently, by the metonymic relations between the meanings of the verb. In the context of oral communication, in the absence of a codified norm, the transition of the semantically capacious verb to know from one adjacent semantic zone to another turns out to be easier, since the speaker finds it conve nient to designate the situation, which saves him from searching for a more accurate unit of nomination. The correlation of knowledge with related semantic fields indicates its importance in traditional culture. Knowledge is a value guideline, a regulator of the behavior of a representative of folk culture. A villager knows and understands a lot, his skills are vast. His knowledge has been shaped primarily by his own life experiences. However, he does not insist on the absoluteness of his knowledge, he is able to admit his incompetence in a number of issues or to refer to the absence of some accessible information. At the same time, the studied material contains practically no information about obtaining knowledge by teaching something or studying something.