27.English phraseology. Classifications of phraseological units.

Phraseological units are defined as non-motivated word groups that cannot be freely made up in speech but are reproduced in speech as ready-made units.The essential features of phraseological units are stability of lexical components and lack of motivation.

Stability of phraseological unit implies that it exists as a ready-made linguistic unit which does not allow any variability of its lexical components and grammatical structure.

Reproducibility is regular use of phraseological units in speech as single unchangeable collocations.

Idiomaticity is the quality of phraseological units when the meaning of the whole is not deducible from the sum of meaning of the parts.

One of the existing classifications of phraseological units was done by V.V.Vinogradov . He classified phraseological units in 3 groups:

1.Phraseological fusions are completely non-motivated word groups in which the meaning of the components have no connection with meaning of the whole group:red tape-бюрократія, a battle of the books – вчений диспут.

2. Phraseological unities are partially non-motivated as their meaning can usually be deduced through metaphoric meaning of the whole phraseological unit:to show one’s teeth-погрожув.

3. Phraseological combinations are motivated but they are made up of words possessing specific lexical valency which accounts for a certain degree of stability in such word groups.In phraseological combinations variability of member words is strictly limited.Eg.:” to bear a grudge” (мати зуб на когось) may be changed into “to bear malice” but not into “to bear a fancy”or “to bear a liking”. They may express:

1.attributive relations:acute pain, black sheep;

2.object relations: to declare war,to take measures;

3.subject-predicative relations: extremes meet, time flies;

4.adverbial relations: to freeze hard, to rain fast.

Another classification of phraseological units was suggested by N.Amosova. According to N.Amosova phraseological units are units of a fixed context. Proceeding from the assumption that individual meaning of polysemantic words can be observed in certain context and may be viewed as depending on those contexts, it is argued that phraseological units are also to be defined through specific types of contexts. Free word groups make up variable contexts while the essential feature of phraseological units is a non-variable or fixed context.

Fixed context is context characterized by a specific and unchanging sequence of definite lexical components and peculiar semantic relationship between them. Units of fixed context are subdivided into:

1.phrasemes are always binary. One of the components has phraseologically bound meaning, the other serves as the determining context.Eg.:”to grind one’s teeth”(скреготати зубами) – “to grind” has a phraseologically bound meaning , “one’s teeth” serves as a determining context.

2.idioms cannot be separated into components. New meaning of idiom is created by unit as a whole though every element keeps its usual value. Eg. “a mare’s nest”- nonsense.