Classification of phraseological units by

N.N. AMOSOVA,

Phraseological units in Modern English are also approached from the contextual point of view. This approach is suggested by Prof. N.N. Amosova in her book: Основы английской фразеологии. Л., 1963.

Prof. Amosova argues that phraseological units are to be defined through specific types of context. Free word-groups make up variable contexts whereas the essential feature of phraseological units is a non variable or fixed context.

In such word-groups as a small town the words town and small may be substituted for by a number of other nouns, e.g. room, audience, etc., the adjectives large big can replace "small” The substitution does not affect the meanings of the other member of the word group (small town, large town, small room). Unlike word-groups with variable members phraseological units allow of no substitution. In the phraseological unit “small hours” – the early hours of the morning from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. – there is no variable member as “small” denotes "early" only in collocation with “hours” A non-variable context is indicative of a specialised meaning of one of the member- words. It follows that specialised meaning and stability of lexical components are regarded as interdependent features of phraseological units.

According to the criterion of context phraseological units are subdivided by N.N. Amosova into two types called phrasemes and idioms. Phrasemes are two-member word-groups in which one of the members has a specialised meaning dependent of the second component as in "small hours" (the second component (hours) serves as the only clue to this particu1ar meaning of the component "small” the meaning early is found only in the given (fixed) context "small hours"). Idioms are distinguished from phrasemes by the idiomaticity of. the whole word-group (red tape — "bureaucratic methods") and the. impossibility of attaching meaning to the members of the group taken in isolation. Idioms may comprise unusual combinations of words which, when understood in their literal meaning, are normally uncollocable as, e.g. "mare's nest" (a mare — "a female horse"), “a. mare's nest" — "a discovery which proves false or worthless"). The clue to the idiomatic meaning is to be found in a wider context outside the phrase itself.

Some Debatable Points

The main objections to the contextual approach are as follows:

1. Non-variability of context does not necessarily imply specialised meaning of the component or the components of the word-group. In some cases complete stability of the lexical components is found in word-groups including words of a narrow or specific range of lexical valency as, e.g. "shrug one's shoulders".

2. N.N. Amosova insists on fixed context being unique. Thus, although we know only two expressions where break means "to reveal", namely to break the news and to break the matter, these expressions are not considered by Amosova as belonging to phraseology. On the other hand, the expression "fiddler's news" = "stale news" is considered unique. However, the uniqueness of a linguistic unit is something that cannot be proved. Nobody can guarantee that a similar expression, something like, fiddler's yarn", does not occur in the text of a book one has not read.