Comparative analysis of Russian and Chinese proverbs denoting household items

This article presents a comparative analysis of Russian and Chinese proverbs containing lexemes denoting household items (house/home, wall, door, table, clothing). The object of the study is the associative features realized in the semantics of these proverbs; the aim is to identify and describe the typology of associative features in the paremiological corpora of the two languages within the framework of the word's associative potential model. The material consists of a corpus of Russian and Chinese proverbs extracted from the Phraseological Dictionary of Modern Russian Language edited by Yu. A. Larionova (2014) and the Large Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs edited by Wen Ruizheng (2011). The corpus includes 66 proverbs: 26 Russian and 40 Chinese, selected according to the principles of functional equivalence and thematic representativeness. The methodological toolkit includes comparative analysis, componential analysis, typological classification of the word's associative potential (coincident, overlapping, divergent, and lacunar types), and frequency analysis. The novelty of the research lies in the first systematic comparative analysis of Russian and Chinese proverbs about household items using a typology of associative features. It has been established that the paremiological corpus is dominated by lacunar associative features (39.4%), conditioned by the culturally specific distribution of proverbs in the two languages; a significant share is occupied by coincident (22.7%), overlapping (21.2%), and divergent (16.7%) types, which reflect universal and culturally specific components of linguistic consciousness. The dominance of the lacunar type demonstrates the high cultural specificity of the paremiological material: many proverbs from one tradition have no direct equivalents in the other. Lacunae are associated with unique ethnocultural experience and different degrees of paremiological actualization of similar realities. The coincident type reflects universal representations of household items, while the overlapping and divergent types record a gradual increase in cultural-semantic differences.