Phraseology as a language system and linguistic disccipline
According to the definition suggested by Professor A.V. Kunin, Phraseology is a science that focuses on phraseological units stable word combinations with a complicated semantics which are not modeled on structural semantic patterns of free word combinatins. It is a peculiar subsystem of the language which is marked by high informative potentialities and expressive qualities, laconism and figurative character.
Due to the close relation of phraseology to national culture, its great informative and expressive value, Professor A.V. Kunin called this language system “a treasure house of the language” (4, p.5). The outstanding Russian philologist F.I. Buslaev said that where the national-cultural aspects of language, its connection with history, cognitive experience and spiritual life of peple manifest themselves most brighly is phraseology.
Phraseological units fill up lacunas in the lexica system of the language, which is never sufficient enough to name all the variety of things ever known to man, and in many cases are the only nominations of this or that thing. Action, phenomenon or situation. Thanks to their imagery and expressiveness phraseological units manage to smooth the contradictins between man’s boundless thought and and insufficency of the lexical resources. By means of a bright living image of the nominated bject they activate al relevant knowledge associated with it and stored in man’s memory. This cognitive mechanism accounts for the high dgree of informativeness of phraseology its ability to reflect people’s history, cuture and life.
Phraseological units represent the most conservative part of the language as they are not as subject to free varition in speech as exical units. Their stablity,especially semantic invariance, permits to preserv intact all knowledge related to people’s beliefs, views and valus which gave rise to phraseological units and which find manifestation in the meaning of these units. Furthermore, the semantic mechanism of compression inherent in phraseology makes phraseological units very capacious and laconic signs of the language. Praseological meaning, especially that of idioms, accumulates all relevant information concerning the original situation that brought about the corresponding unit. This information is represented in the meaning implicitly in a compressed form – the inherent quality of phraseology whch A. Potebnya called “condensation of thought” (7).
For example, the idiom the prodigal son not only designates the notion “a repentant sinner” but also comprises the content of the biblical parable (Luke 15:11-32) which gave rise to the idiom. Though not present in the foreground of the phrasroligical meaning, this conceptua content is stored in the implicit component of the idiom and serves as its motivating factor. In the same way idioms reflect national-cultural heritage including ethnic beliefs, legends, traditions, folklore and literary works. Thus, the idiom to fight like Kilkenny cats arose in allusion to the legend of the 17th century conflict between the towns Kilkenny and Irishtown in Ireland which ended only after a complete destruction of both. The idiom cakes and ale was coined by Shakespeare in his play “The Twelfth Night” and later popularized by W.S. Maugham in his novel Cakes and Ale. So, phraseological units apparently bear a touch of national culture, so their semantics includes a cultural component: besides their phraseological (linguistic) meaning, phraseological units carry various types of extralingustic information. It comprises knowledge of the world and national culture, beliefs, moral values and stereotypes of the people.
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Phraseology is anthropocentric by its nature – semantics of most units revolves around man, his activities, attitudes and traits of character. As it has already been mentioned, man tries to modulate reality as commensurable with himself, tries, so to speak. To humanize the objects of the outer world. That is why many nominations attribute human qualities to animals and unanimated objects and vice versa. A person can be descrbed as stone deaf (absoutely deaf), hard as nails (very cruel and selfish), or a bull in a china shop (very awkward). It’s evident that such phraseological nominations not only designate certain qualities of man, but also do it rather expressively. Identification by means of imagery of man with an animal or a thing permits an idiom to make the nomination intensive, express a very high degree of the designated property.
Here it should be pointed out that despite their evidently important expressive function, phroseological units are in the first place nominative and highly informative signs of the language, which cannot be regarded merely as expressive equivalents of words, so the more as a “decoration”. Just like words phraseological units serve to formulate and verbalize concepts and thus play a significant role in the process of conceptualization. Only, due to the indirect (figurative) type of nomination, they create a specific model of the world which is called by many scholars “phraseological”.
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