MYTHOLOGEME AS A CULTURAL BASIS FOR THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE REALITY (BASED ON RUSSIAN AND BULGARIAN LANGUAGES)

The paper is devoted to the metaphor as a cognitive model and a tool for preservation of spiritual value basis. The objective of the article is to establish a correlation mythologeme – metaphor and define mythologemes as the cultural basis for the world's conceptualization. Metaphors serve as a means for intergenerational transfer of the cultural basis underlying the world's conceptualization. The metaphor is viewed as a continuation of the myth because they have common functions and operating modalities although the metaphor has its own realization awareness and specific language representation of mental images. Mythologemes are perceived as structural archetypes of the myth, which in the form of structured meta-images, belong to the basis of the world's conceptualization. The conceptual domain of cooking and food is considered to be a traditional means for the world's conceptualization with very deep mythological roots. The formation of the Russian and Bulgarian archetypal vision of food took place in the depths of Slavic mythology against the background of the human knowledge evolution. In this paper, an attempt is made to highlight a number of mythologemes on the material of the Russian and Bulgarian concepts pirog / banitsa. The mythologeme is used as a method for interpreting the value aspect of the world conceptualization in contemporary linguocultures. The conclusion is made that the conceptualization of the world reality is regulated by the existing mythologemes. The Russian and Bulgarian linguocultures share the same structural prototypes underlying the world conceptualization (pirog / banitsa – macrocosm; pirog / banitsa – microcosm; pirog / banitsa – standard, measure). The existence of these mythologemes is confirmed by the functioning metaphors after the model pirog / banitsa – a resource in the modern Russian and Bulgarian languages as well as by the presence of a sustainable metaphor in the phraseological and paremiological funds. Implementation of the mythologeme pirog / banitsa – microcosm is reflected in figurative nominations with some gender differentiations in Russian and Bulgarian. Linguocultural proximity of the Russian concept pirog and Bulgarian concept banitsa stems from the presence of a spiritual value basis and universal models of worldview and moral guidelines typical of Slavic peoples.