Part 2: Stylistic Phraseology

1. General considerations.

2. The stylistic classification of phraseological units.

3. The peculiar use of phraseological units as stylistic devices.

4. Stylistic quasi-phraseology, or phenomena related to phraseology.

Theoretical back-up

1. General considerations

The question of the status of phraseology and phraseological units in the language system is very debatable and complicated. By phraseology is understood a group of lexicalized word combinations, a certain stock of language expressive means which are equivalents of words. So the position of phraseological units in the language system is intermediate between vocabulary (lexical system) and syntax. Formally, judging by the structure of phraseological units, they are syntactical word combinations. For example, the English equivalent of the Russian word “волокита” would be ‘red tape’. Of course, this word-combination exists in the English language, so to speak, on two levels: as a free word-combination, which means “красная ленточка” and as a lexicalized word-combination - a phraseological unit, or an idiom - “волокита”. Consequently, from the semantic point of view, phraseological units are word equivalents because their general meaning is not reduced to the meanings of their components, and from the structural point of view they might be considered part of syntax, because some of them are word-combinations and some of them are sentence equivalents.

The first thing that must be mentioned concerning phraseological units is that they, unlike the words, in which the connection between the morphemes is more rigid, are much wider as far as their variability is concerned. And because they are characterized by syntactical, shall we say, wordiness, or separateness of a phraseological unit, they are much more looser, much more freer than the connections between the morphemes in a word. We cannot, for example, insert any morpheme in between the morphemes of a word, but we can insert words between the components of a phraseological unit. E.g.: “Don’t push your nose into other people’s affairs”. We may also say: “Don’t push your long nose into other people’s affairs”. One must point out that most phraseological units, unlike words, contain not only primary, but also some additional information. This is conditioned by the fact that very many phraseological units are formed as a result of secondary nomination for more expressivity or signification of a concept or phenomenon which have already been signified and named by words. Alongside with the adjectives which have the meaning of positive evaluation such as: good, marvelous, splendid etc. we have such phraseological units as: as good as gold, in which the positive evaluation may be considered as a kind of superlative degree. Alongside with the free word combinations like ‘a good thing’, something which is valuable, we have a number of phraseological units like quite the potato. To denote such concept as a difficult situation we have a phraseological unit a tight conner etc.

So one might conclude that phraseological units are created not for the sake of naming some new phenomena, but for further specification and for emotional evaluation of things, phenomena, actions, qualities, which have already been named in the language. On the other hand, there are such phraseological units which, so to speak, fill up the empty spaces in the language nominational systems, the “holes” as we say, or as scientists would call them “lacunae” (comes from the Latin word “lacuna” which is “a hole”). There is an example with the Russian “убеждать” which in the future tense has “a hole”, so instead of saying “я убежу”, (“убедю”), this “hole” is filled in by “я постараюсь убедить”.

There are many phraseological units, which exist parallel to the free word combinations, which are homonymous to them. Or if we take the international phraseological unit which is a translation loan in Russian or in English as “to take the bull by the horns”, which in its primary function is directly the action of taking the bull by its horns, and in the secondary function it has the meaning of just “get down to work without delay”. We see that in the context like: “He took the bull by the horns and pulled it up to the gates” this word group would perform the primary function and in the context like: “I took the bill by the horns and finished the job in three days” that would be the right context for this word combination as phraseological unit of secondary function.