Authors

Natallia Kabiak¹;  ¹ The University of Melbourne, Australia

Discussion

This paper is the first of its kind in English to examine the usage of ‘winged phrases’ from Soviet cinema; that is, phrases from films, as they make their way into spoken Russian and thereby enter the collective consciousness. Drawing on theoretical insights based on the field of semiotics (Lotman), this study analyses 102 responses to an online questionnaire collected in 2017 from the Bilingual online group which includes Russian teachers and Russian language enthusiasts around the world. The paper presents a tendency in contemporary spoken Russian for the popular winged phrases to be transformed yet remain recognizable; winged phrases from Soviet films are considered as a new Russian folklore genre and constitute a cultural ‘text-code’ (Lotman) travelling through time and maintained most strongly through spoken language.