ИСТИНА

The report deals with the functions of animals in Dutch folk tales. The Dutch folk tales are almost not known among the readers and researches, which makes them an interesting material for analysis. For the article twenty-five folk tales were analyzed, fifteen of them are published and eleven are found on the web-site of a folklore research institute in Amsterdam “Meertens institute”. The animals from the folk tales are seen in this work as a zoo-metaphor, which is correspondent with the theory of conceptual metaphor of G.Lakoff and M.Johnson. The idea of conceptual metaphor and the accepting of animals as metaphors let the author speak about the reflection of a specific perception of the world by the Dutch folk in the animal concepts. Three main functions of the animals are noted in the work: a hero, an instrument and a unit. A mention should be made about the fact that two of these functions can be represented at the same time: a hero and a unit. So that the function of a hero can be divided in two: “a hero-unit” and “a real hero”.