Lecture 9. Phraseologisms and discourse stereotypes. Cultural markedness through association with different discourse types.

Lecture 9. Phraseologisms and discourse stereotypes: Cultural markedness through association with different discourse types.

9.1. Religious and philosophical discourse

9.2. Literary discourse

9.3. Poetic folklore discourse

9.4. Political discourse

Objectives: to demonstrate various forms of phraseologisms and discourse stereotypes.

As has been pointed out, in some cases the material for the formation of a lexical collocation is borrowed from a specific discourse. All collocations of this type are culturally marked through their association with a particular body of discourse. We have been able to identify at least four discourse types that are very productive in generating the culturally relevant phraseologisms, mostly restricted collocations.

9.1. Religious and philosophical discourse

Lexical collocations such as demonicheskaya strast', lit. 'demoniac passion', sataninskaya gordost', lit. 'satanic pride',

pravednuiy gnev, lit. 'righteous wrath' all contain cultural semes in their collocators. Other lexical collocations, for instance

nebesnaya/nezemnaya lyubov', lit. 'celestial/unearthly love', also represent a cultural concept. Still others, like ostolbenet'

ot strakha/Medusa the Gorgon). Significantly, all of them are biblical or classical allusions and are more or less easily identified as

such by language-users. Hence their high cultural potential.

9.2. Literary discourse

Collocations such as liricheskaya/romanticheskaya lyubov', lit. 'lyrical/ romantic love', poeticheskoe/sentimental' noe

chuvstvo, lit. 'poetic/sentimental feeling', elegicheskaya grust', lit. 'elegiac sadness', have a cultural background associated

with different literary movements (Romanticism, Sentimentalism). Various 'cultural heroes', and their associated

behaviour, feelings and ideas, come to be stereotyped by a linguistic-cultural community and verbalized by means of

lexical collocations.

Thus, the notion of romantic love (Russ. romanticheskaya lyubov') can be historically associated with the first third of the

nineteenth century -- the Romantic period. What contemporary everyday linguistic meaning has absorbed from

Romanticism in terms of love obviously amounts to the connotation of romantic love as 'an elevated, idealistic emotion

associated with the young'. Just like pervaya lyubov″ (see above), the lexical collocations toska po rodine, lit. 'anguish for

the homeland', i.e. 'nostalgia', dorozhnaya toska, lit.'road misery', i.e. the acute discomfort one feels when making a long

and tedious journey along a Russian road, are phraseological clichés from literary texts that describe an emotional state

experienced not only as a fact of reality but also as a fact of culture. Literary discourse gives emotions a kind of cultural

dimension. For instance, toska po rodine denotes not simply 'acute homesickness' but an emotion that has been thoroughly elaborated in the Russian literary tradition, especially when one recalls that many generations of Russians

have been forced into exile and that many still live outside their homeland (cf. Polish tesknic and English homesick,

analysed by Wierzbicka 1992).Of special interest are collocations referring to the prototypical personal name of a historical

character -- e.g. sal'ericheskaya zavist', lit. 'Salieri's envy', shekspirovskie strasti, lit. 'Shakespearian passions', vol'terova

ironiya, lit. 'Voltairian irony', platonicheskaya lyubov', lit. 'Platonic love'.Lexical collocations such as gore/sud'ba stuchitsya

v dom/v dver', lit. 'grief/fate knocks at the house/door', reflect the personification and individualization of human destiny

typical of Russian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here, Grief and Fate act as mythological personae,

while the house, the door, the knock at the door are cultural signs. The collocation proper could be regarded as a quasistandard

of the Path (see similar examples with life and death above).