Jan Stanislav Institute of Slavistics SAS
Topic
Demonological Lexicon in Slovak Folklore Compared to non-Slavic Traditions
PhD. program
Year of admission
2026
Name of the supervisor
Doc. Mgr. Katarína Žeňuchová, PhD.
Contact:
Receiving school
Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre
Annotation
The aim of the work is to systematically describe and interpret the names of supernatural beings and demonic characters in Slovak folklore discourse and to identify their semantic, functional and symbolic parallels in the wider Slavic context. The theoretical basis is the concept of the linguistic worldview, Slavic ethnolinguistics and cognitive semantics. Demonological lexicon is understood as an important part of the traditional value system, which reflects ideas about the boundaries between the natural and supernatural world, about the categories of good and evil, purity and impurity or safety and threat. The analysis is based on the material of folk tales, songs, superstitious stories and ritual texts and focuses on lexical names (e.g. devil, witch, sea, waterman), their synonymous rows, derivational procedures, phraseology and metaphorical models. The comparative approach allows us to identify common Slavic types of demonological beings, as well as specific national variants and semantic shifts conditioned by the historical, religious and cultural development of individual environments. The work contributes to a deeper understanding of the traditional spiritual culture of the Slavs and to the systematization of demonological lexicon as an important part of the folklore linguistic picture of the world.