Figurative nominations of the father and mother in Karelian wedding lyrics

The article continues a series of studies on the character code of Karelian weddings and figurative nominations in folklore texts for family-related rituals. The focus here is on the images of the parents: the bride’s and the groom’s father and mother. We examine their role in ritual acts and point out the main naming types, which reflect the mechanisms through which family relationships function in the wedding ritual context. The aim is to determine the figurative nominations that help actualize the parents/father/mother concepts. The following tasks were fulfilled in the process: case-studying the corpus of Karelian wedding lyrics, the set of lexemes, poetic formulas explicating the parent (father and mother) characters was scrutinized, revealing the features common to all and specific to each concept. The study was based on the descriptive method, using also contextual and ethnolinguistic analysis. The dataset was the wedding lyrics corpus comprising published and archival texts of joik songs, laments, as well as epic runo songs integrated in the wedding ritual and constituting the wedding runo song series. Variants originating from all over the territory populated by Karelians were used in the analysis. Additional sources included dialect dictionaries and paroemiological data. From the linguoculturology perspective, this research on parent (father and mother) nominations contributes to advancing the Karelian folklore studies. The analysis revealed that the roles and functions of parents in the wedding ritual have undergone change: the position of the mother, who used to play the key role in the family relationships, has been taken over by the father – the man, the house master. The texts under study have preserved a uniform nomination system for these characters. The symbolization of the father and the mother aligns with the archetypal ideas established in the folk mind. Differences in the nominations are connected with the change of the bride’s and groom’s social statuses. Research on wedding lyrics, first of all Karelian wedding runo songs, will be continued by exploring sacral characters in weddings.

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