St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

62 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике СЕКЦИЯ 4 Языки Афганистана и трансграничных регионов афганской культурно-лингвистической ойкумены PANEL FOUR The Languages of Afghanistan and the Liminal Areas of the Afghan Linguistic and Cultural Oecumene Shervonsho Alamshoev (Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia; Khorog State University, Khorog, Tajikistan) Phraseological Antonyms in the Shughni Language The Shughni language belongs to the unwritten Eastern-Iranian languages spoken by about 100–150 thousand people in Tajikistan andAfghanistan. The phraseology of the Shughni language is not fully documented and linguistic analysis is limited to only a few general articles (S. V. Khushenova 1971, T. Bakhtibekov 1972, M. Alamshoev 1985). This lack of theoretical developments in the field of Shughni phraseology is largely due to the lack of written texts and lexical units. More than 7,000 phraseological units collected by the author during a five-year research in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan and among the inhabitants of Badakhshan province of Afghanistan provide the source-base of this study. Moreover, the author himself is a native speaker of the language under consideration. The subject of this study is the antonymous phraseological units of the Shughni language. 1. The antonymic phraseological units vary greatly in semantic nuances, grammatical form and expressiveness. Some researchers consider the antonymic phraseological units to be lexical variants 1 . We share the point of view of those 1 Kunin A.  V. Kurs frazeologii sovremennogo angliiskogo iazyka. Moscow, 1972. P. 185–199.