8.2 Phraseology

Phraseology has been traditionally presented as a subfield of lexicology, but in recent decades it has developed into a separate discipline taught at universities. “From the mid-1970s, and increasingly throughout the 1980s, one of the strongest influences on British phraseological theory was the work of a group leading Russian scholars who had been active about thirty years earlier” (Cowie, p. 213). British scholars mention in their works Russian scholars such as V.V. Vinogradov, who is regarded as “the father of Russian phraseology” (Cowie, 2001, p.213) and N.N. Amosova, because of a “formulation of phraseologically bound meaning” (p.213). Although the views of these two scholars differ, the differences are in terminology rather than in substance.

There is no agreement among the scholars in regards to terming set-expressions with transferred meaning. Although most scholars use the term phraseological units or phraseologisms (Chernyisheva, 1964; Kunin, 1963; Vinogradov, 1947; Ginzburg, 1979), others name them differently. Irina Arnold (1973) speaks of set-expressions; Zgusta (1971), set combinations; and Mel’čuk (1988b), phrasemes, or set phrases. Cowie and Howarth, who were influenced by Russian models, name them word-combinations. Palmer uses the term an ‘idiom.’

8.3 Definition of a Phraseological Unit

There is no agreement on the definition of a phraseological unit, either. Phraseology can be “loosely defined as the study of conventional phrases, where a phrase means a multi-word expression up to sentence level” (Pawley, 2001). A.V. Kunin defines it as “a stable combination of words with complete or partial transferred meaning” (1970, p. 210). Ginzburg et al speaks of “non-motivated word-groups that cannot be freely made up in speech but are reproduced as ready-made units” (1979, p. 74). Rosemarie Gläser defines a phraseological unit as a “lexicalized, reproducible bilexemic or polylexemic word group in common use, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized, may carry connotations, and may have an emphatic or intensifying function in a text” (2001, p.125). It should be noted that in early 1930s, H. E. Palmer set up a project to collect collocations-- words which “have more specific meanings” (1933). He states that idioms involve collocation of a special kind, and their meanings are not “related to the meaning of the individual words” (p.80), e.g., kick the bucket. He concludes that the meaning of idioms “cannot be predicted from the meanings of the words themselves” (p.80). David Crystal uses the term ‘idiom,’ or ‘idiomatic expression,’ and notes that its meaning “cannot be deduced by examining the meanings of the constituent lexemes” (1996, p.163). Rosalia Ginzburg sums up that the term ‘idioms’ generally implies that the essential feature of the linguistic units under consideration is idiomaticity, or lack of motivation. This term is habitually used by English and American linguists, and it is very often treated as synonymous with the term phraseological unit” (1979, p. 74). After analyzing the proposed definitions, we believe Kunin’s definition of a phraseological unit, as a stable combination of words with partially and fully figurative meaning, is more effective because the main feature of a phraseological unit is its transferred meaning, and it is characterized by the stability of its components.