Natalia G. Arefieva
Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor at the Chair of Social Sciences
Odessa National Medical University,
Odessa, Ukraine
e-mail: n.arefieva@onu.edu.ua; nataliia.arefieva@onmedu.edu.ua
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4974-9157
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24195/2616-5317-2026-42.2
SUMMARY
The article, drawing on a wealth of linguistic material, explores Slavic phraseological units that reflect the symbolics of kalach. The powerful cultural symbolics of kalach as an archaic cultural symbol, clearly represented in Slavic phraseology, is described. The author concludes that the sacred symbolics of kalach, fixed mainly by regional phraseology, its protective and productive functions, and its exceptionally important role in baptismal and wedding rituals, has a deep mythodological basis and is assosiated with the cult of the sun – an ancient sacred symbol, a source of life-given force, sublimity and happiness, the round shape of wich is encoded in such symbols established in folk culture as the kalach, korovay, vinok, wedding ring and others. That is why in Slavic phraseology, the kalach appears as a symbol of abundance, well-being and good fortune. The functional role of kalach, its ontological properties are understood in Slavic phraseology within the framework of semiotic oppositions and highlight various aspects of the human personality, life experience, etc. Kalach appears in the center of a number of prescriptions established in culture. The vivid and multifaceted representation of kalach in Slavic phraseology, primarily Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian, indicates the exceptional cultural load of this term, placing it in the category of powerful cultural symbols. In the process of research, a rich phraseological material was involved, the methodology of ethnolinguistic and cultural analysis, semiotic analysis, the method of structural and semantic modeling and the substitution technique were applied.
Key words: Slavic phraseology, cultural symbol, mythological background, semiotic opposition, cultural prescription, conceptual metaphor, Slavic cultural tradition.
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