The polysemy of the lexeme “bread” and its functioning in the Russian folk riddle

In this article, the authors examine the polysemy of the lexeme bread, which can be found in a Russian folk riddle. The proverbs recorded in the collection “Riddles” prepared by V. V. Mitrofanova served as a material for the analysis. The paper analyzes the uses of the polysemantic lexeme bread both in the answer and in the text of the riddle itself.

The designation of the original denotation using the lexeme bread is based on the denotative meaning, while the most popular are two main lexical-semantic options: ‘a food product baked from flour’; ‘grains (rye, wheat, etc.)’. The polysemy of the word influences the division of the riddles with the answer bread according to thematic content into two sections of the collection: “Food, drink”, “Arable land, mowing, sowing and processing of bread”.

In the question part of the lexeme, bread is used both in literal and figurative meaning. The derived meaning that arises on the basis of the metaphor is due to associative features that are not semantically essential for ideas about bread. The lexical ambiguity of the word bread serves as a linguistic means of realizing the playful nature of the riddle process.

The peculiarities of the use of lexical-semantic variants of the lexeme bread in the question and answer parts indicate that polysemy is a genre-forming property of this type of proverb.