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The present study focuses on a single Russian proverb от сумы да тюрьмы не зарекайся (its equivalent in English: no fence against a flail). Its literal meaning is ‘No one is insured from prison and impoverishment’. This proverb is deeply rooted in the Russian history, and it belongs to the paremiological minimum of Russian language. The use of this proverb has rapidly increased recently. One can easily understand the reason for this fact since one of the richest men in the world, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was sentenced to a number of years in prison and was released just a few months ago. It is not surprising that approximately half of Russian entrepreneurs have come into collision with justice. The analysis of the history and modern use of the proverb has been done with the help of Russian National Corpus, examples come from 19th- and 20th-century texts. Our analysis has shown that this proverb still preserves a very tight relationship with the history of language and society. The dynamics of the development of its new meaning is very fast. It turns out that in case of synchronic paremiology both the base of linguistic data as well as the theoretical and methodological base of research are changing. Old meanings (paremiological minimum/optimum, norm) and methods of psycholinguistic experiments demand constant correction.
In this study we analyze the results of a sociolinguistic survey conducted in Hungary in 2004–2005, with the goal of exploring some popular views of the proverb and anti-proverb and their functions in contemporary Hungarian society. Using data collected from 298 subjects, we focus on three major questions. First, our aim was to establish the lists of the proverbs most frequently used nowadays, as well as the ones most popular for variation. Our second goal was to discover our subjects’ thoughts about the use of proverbs and anti-proverbs, as well as about their views of the people who use them. And, last but not least, our third task was to compare what people say about their own usage of proverbs and anti-proverbs to what they think about the ways in which other people use these expressions.The complex analysis of the results of the survey can illumine interesting aspects; for example, the correlation between the subject’s gender and age and the use of proverbs and anti-proverbs. We also have to deal with the contradictions of folk concepts concerning this topic: there is a significant contrast between the ways in which subjects describe their own habits and the ways in which they talk about other people’s use of proverbs and anti-proverbs.
