Connection between concepts of "Beginning" and "End" in Russian proverbs

The article presents the results of a survey of 109 respondents aimed at identifying patterns in understanding and using the proverbial model that verbalizes the relationship between “beginning” and “end” and reflects a culture’s core stance toward these concepts. It demonstrates that among the respondents’ formulations of this relationship, the positive model “a good beginning leads to a good end” predominates (66 %), exhibiting considerable variation and a personalization of the “beginning” through attributes typically associated with the subject’s activity. Individual responses reveal respondents’ deep reflections and an appreciation of life’s cyclicality. A test of respondents’ knowledge of proverbs about the connection and importance of beginning and end brought into the open the most frequent expressions – both with transparent semantics and with implicitly expressed links between beginning and end. Finally, respondents’ interpretations of two proverbs provided clear evidence both of the semantic indeterminacy of proverbs and of the importance of the paremiological context as a basis for interpreting even those proverbs unfamiliar to the speaker.