Abstract

The article in question deals with the linguistic contrastive analysis of the semanticosyntactic structure of Ukrainian and English proverbs. The attention has been focused on the sentence structure including stylistic, functional and semantic overtones. Paroemias are considered as a complicated semantic category which may refl ect the specifi city of perception of the objective reality by the representatives of diff erent ethnos in general and each fragment in particular. In a wide sense a paroemia is an archetype unit that represents ancient culture, traditions and mentality of each nation. The common and diff erent features have been identifi ed according to structure, lexical background and meaning. The most widespread similarities and diff erences have been determined in both languages with the help of structural models.