ИСТИНА

The paper deals with riddles as signs of language, mind and culture in the framework of cognitive and cultural studies. Riddles are studied as paroemias which contain various images and can be characterized by stability of form and reproducibility. Similarly to idioms, riddles consist of two or more components creating one meaning represented in the solution of the riddle given. The focus is on the ways of categorization and conceptualisation of the world in riddles, the research of the ways of representation of different types of information in these signs. The research is concerned with the semantic structure of riddles and the development of cognitive and cultural comments. Constitutive elements of the riddles under consideration are revealed by means of frame analysis and the reason to use the images forming the basis of the riddles is explained with the help of a cultural comment.