CONTRASTIVE PHRASEOLOGY Lecture # 1

1. Phraseology as a Discipline; 2. The Structure of Phraseological Units; 3. Current Trends in Phraseology (Three Approaches). 4. Phraseology as a discipline Phraseology is a branch of linguistics which studies different types of set expressions. Set expressions are non-motivated or partially motivated word groups that cannot be freely made up in speech, but are reproduced as ready-made units. e.g. to carry coals to New Castle; a white elephant, to have ones heart in ones boots; to build castles in the air, , , etc. Phraseology is an intermediary field, being close, in the reference literature, both to vocabulary studies, since it studies fixed word combinations, characterized by a unitary meaning, as well as to syntax, since phraseological phenomena are defined by syntactic relations of various kinds. Given the expressive nature of phraseological phenomena, these have also been associated to stylistics. But beyond the closeness to different linguistic disciplines, phraseology tends to be regarded as an autonomous discipline, with its own object and methods of investigation. The term phraseology designates the discipline as well as its object, the set or totality of phraseological units in a given language. As an autonomous discipline, the object of research of phraseology consists in phraseological units from a given language (or a group of languages). Controversial problems in the field of phraseology: Terminology: set-expressions, phraseological units (V. V. Vinogradov), idioms (western scholars), fixed expressions, stable expressions, etc. Distinguishing between phraseological units and free word groups. Phraseology is a scholarly approach to language which developed in the twentieth century. It took its start when Charles Bally's notion of locutions phraseologiques entered Russian lexicology and lexicography in the 1930s and 1940s and was subsequently developed in the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. From the late 1960s on it established itself in (East) German linguistics but was also sporadically approached in English linguistics. Russian phraseological theory, in the forms in which it developed from the late 1940s to the 1960s, was first mediated to non-Russianspeaking scholars by R. Klappenbach (

Probleme der phraseologie, 1968), U. Weinreich (Problems of analysis of idioms, 1969), I. Arnold (The English Word, 1973), and L. Lipka (An Outline of English Lexicology, 1974). In Great Britain as well as other Western European countries, phraseology has steadily been developed over the last twenty years. The activities of the European Society of Phraseology (EUROPHRAS) and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) with their regular conventions and publications attest to the prolific European interest in phraseology. Bibliographies of recent studies on English and general phraseology are included in Welte (1990) and specially collected in Cowie & Howarth (1996) whose bibliography is reproduced and continued on the internet and provides a rich source of the most recent publications in the field. The beginning of the formation of phraseology as a discipline is tightly connected with the name of Swiss scientist Charles Bally. However he did not consider it necessary to allocate phraseology as a separate discipline, he included it in structure of lexicology science and studied PhU mainly in the stylistic aspect. He thought that semantic features are the core of an idiom. If every graphic unit in any word combination partly or fully loses its meaning, but a clear meaning of a word combination is generally preserved, we have to do with a phraseological unit. The scientist expressed a range of progressive ideas, by which he contributed a lot to the development of phraseology as a science. What concerns the classification of phraseological units, so proceeding from the degree of stability of semantic links between components Charles Bally defined four groups of word combinations: 1. free word combinations (les groupements libres) not syntactically stable, easily formed in everyday speech; 2. usual word combinations (les groupements usuels) combinations with relatively free syntactical relations where some change of components is possible (e.g. poor visibility limited visibility); 3. phraseological series (les series phrasologiques) groups of words with primary word formation as a main factor of stability (e.g. to break silence, to make friends, to fall in love with); 4. phraseological unities (les unites phrasologiques) - semantically indivisible, and the meaning of which cannot be deduced from the meanings of their components (once in a blue moon, under the rose). 5. The structure of phraseological units According to Larysa Skrypnyk, phraseological unit is a lexical and grammatical unity of two or more separate components, grammatically organized according to a model of a sentence or a word combination, which has one whole meaning and is used in speech automatically, by tradition. Thus PhU has following structural criterion

The structural invariability of phraseological units: no (or rather limited) substitutions of components: E.g. to carry coals to Manchester Cf. The cargo ship is carrying coal to Manchester. restrictions on the componential extension of phraseological units: E.g. the big white elephant; he is having his heart in his brown (or black) boots. Cf. I saw a big white elephant in the zoo. grammatical invariability: e.g. from head to feet. e.g. She built for herself the most magnificent castle in the air of which she was the mistress. The meaning in phraseological units: is created by mutual interaction of elements conveys a single concept the actual meaning is transferred and opposed to the literal meaning of a wordcombination from which it is derived. Phraseological units possess semantic unity. E.g. to have a bee in ones bonnet (to have an obsession about something, to be eccentric or even a little mad). The degree of transference may vary: E.g. to skate on thin ice (to take risks); the small hours (the early hours in the morning). The meaning in a word-group: is based on the combined meaning of the words constituting its structure. Each element has a much greater semantic independence and stands for a separate concept, e.g. to cut bread, to cut cheese, to eat bread, etc. The semantic unity makes phraseological units similar to words. Structurally, idioms may be in all languages (the classification by Ilko Korunets): 1. sentence idioms (e.g. time and tide wait for no man, ); 2. word group idioms (e.g. Ten Commandments, to be or not to be); 3. metaphorically generalized proper names (e.g. Tom Pepper (great lier), Nosy Parker, traitor, , ). According to R. Zorivchak every PU has a polylexeme construction it consists of a particular combination of lexemes: 1. first sense layer a combination of lexemes with a certain structure and grammatical features. Some semes exfoliate from the content of lexemes. These semes become components of subjective and logical image, which have denotative and connotative meanings; 2. second sense layer the bearer of certain phraseological meaning; verbal image appears on the basis of the first sense layer and then is shaped into a phraseological meaning (sometimes the verbal image is latent) (Schemes 1, 2).

3. Current trends in phraseology Following a steady growth of scholarly interest and activity over the past twenty years, chiefly in Western Europe, but also in the USA, phraseology has now become the major field of pure and applied research for Western linguists that it had, much earlier, for scholars in the former Soviet Union and other countries of Eastern Europe. Its coming of age has been marked by a number of international conferences, while its acknowledged importance to both theoretical and applied linguists is reflected in several large-scale research projects which have phraseology as their sole or principal focus of interest. Current concerns are by no means purely descriptive. Interest in the analysis of what are variously named phraseological units (R. Ginzburg), word-combinations (O. Akhmanova; A. Cowie), and phrasal lexemes (L. Lipka; R. Moon) is accompanied by an increasing awareness of the prevalence of ready-made memorized combinations in written and spoken language and a wider recognition of the crucial part they play in first and second language acquisition and adult language production. There are also implications for linguistic theory. The notion that native-like proficiency in a language depends crucially on a stock of prefabricated units, varying in complexity and internal stability. This stock is now set in critical opposition to the atomistic view, rooted in generative theory, that the workings of a language can be explained by a system of rules of general applicability, a lexicon largely made up of minimal units and a set of basic principles of semantic interpretation. Recognition of phraseology as an academic discipline within linguistics-the term itself, like the adjective phraseological, reflects Eastern European usage that is evident not only from vigorous and widespread research activity, but also from the publication of several specialized dictionaries reflecting one theoretical perspective or another, and from the attention increasingly given to the subject in textbooks on lexical semantics, lexicology, and vocabulary in language teaching. Threre are three major theoretical approaches in the study of phraseology. Classical Russian theory, with its later extensions and modifications, is probably the most pervasive influence at work in current phraseological studies and is unrivalled in its application to the design and compilation of dictionaries. The system of categories originally developed within that classical tradition. For all these reasons it is the first to be examined in detail. A second strand can be described as broadly anthropological and is represented here by the contribution of Veronika Teliya and her colleagues, which proposes an extension of the Russian phraseological tradition to embrace the cultural dimension. They argue persuasively that this element must be elaborated in all its richness and complexity if the phraseology of a language is to be fully described and understood. A further, highly productive, line of development in phraseology is connected with the names of Rosamund Moon and Bengt Altenberg, to many of the specialists currently engaged in the analysis of phraseology in computer-stored corpora of spoken and written English.

3.1 Classical Russian Theory Chronologically, phraseological studies in Russia and the Soviet Union can be broadly classified in the following way: - 1940-1980s. Vinogradovs phraseological tradition. This period began with the first significant works of V. Vinogradov (1946; 1947; 1953). Most researchers follow Vinogradovs tradition tried to answer the following questions: what is phraseology and how can phresems be classified. In Teliya (1996) this is called the classical period of Russian phraseology. - 1960 up to the present time. Phraseological studies of I. Meluk and his colleagues. This approach can be seen as an alternative to the research tradition based on Vinogradovs theory. The main subject of Meluks studies on phraseology is combinatorial properties of lexical units. - 1980 up to present time. Russian present-day phraseology. This is characterized by increasing interest in cognitive and ethnocultural approaches to phreseme analysis. These periods overlap to a certain extent. For example, studies on phrasems in Vinogradovs tradition can still be found, even today. The main problems and approaches which have played an important role in Russian phraseology are: 1) Classification on phrasemes and the conceptual apparatus of phraseology 2) Connotative aspects and the image structure underlaying the semantics of phrasemes 3) Combinatorial properties of lexical units 4) Contrastive idiom analysis 5) Lexicographic approaches 6) Cognitively based approaches 7) Ethnocultural approaches Its principal legacy is a framework of descriptive categories that is comprehensive, systematic, and soundly based. Most of the early schemes and subsequent refinements are agreed in recognizing a primary division between word-like units, which function syntactically at or below the level of the simple sentence: a clean bill of health if you give someone or something a clean bill of health, you examine them and state that they are healthy, in good condition, or legal; sentence-like units, which function pragmatically as sayings, catchphrases, and conversational formulae: Beauty is only skin deep something that you say which means a person's character is more important than their appearance; Terms used for sentence-like and word-like combinations
Author Cheuisheva (1964) Zgusta ( 1971) Mel'uk ( 1988b) Glser ( 1988a) Cowie ( 1988) General category Phraseological unit Set combination Phraseme, or Set phrase Phraseological unit Word-combination Sentence-like unit Phraseological expression Set group Pragimatic pharseme Proposition Functional expression Word-like unit ----------------------------Semantic phraseme Nomination Composite

Howarth ( 1996)

Word-combination

Functional expression

Composite unit

One of the first Russian phraseologists to refer to this distinction was Chernuisheva ( 1964), whose sentence-like units (called phraseological expressions) included sayings and familiar quotations. A major contribution was made by Victor Vladimirovich Vinogradov and Natalya Nikolaevna Amosova, the latter remembered especially for her view of phraseologically bound meaning, which was to be widely influential. According to Vinogradovs classification all phraseological units are divided into phraseological fusions, phraseological unities and phraseological combinations. 1) Phraseological fusion is a semantically indivisible phraseological unit which meaning is never influenced by the meanings of its components. It means that phraseological fusions represent the highest stage of blending together. The meaning of components is completely absorbed by the meaning of the whole, by its expressiveness and emotional properties. To cry for the moon to demand unreal; under the rose quietly; have nothing to do; keep meaningless conversation, wasting time. Semantic indivisibility emerges or maintained in phraseological fusions when they contain: a) an obsolete words or not understandable for common people: disorient, confuse somebody; to call smb to account or to give short shrift; b) grammatical archaic words: unknown, great mystery; sth that became widely known and everyone is talking about it; Sometimes phraseological fusions are called idioms under which linguists understand a complete loss of the inner form. To explain the meaning of idioms is a complicated etymological problem. 2) Phraseological unity is a semantically indivisible phraseological unit the whole meaning of which is motivated by the meanings of its components. In general, phraseological unities are the phrases where the meaning of the whole unity is not the sum of the meanings of its components but is based upon them and may be understood from the components. The meaning of the significant word is not too remote from its ordinary meanings. This meaning is formed as a result of generalized figurative meaning of a free word-combination. It is the result of figurative metaphoric reconsideration of a word-combination. To come to ones sense to change ones mind; to fall into a rage to get angry; when sb has not yet participate in battles; healthy. Very often these PU have a rhyme ; or alliteration , . V. Vinogradov ascribes clichs, phrase stamps of all literary styles, proverbs and sayings to this subclass. Phraseological unities are analytical (, , ); (, ). Phraseological unities are characterized by the semantic duality. One cant define for sure the semantic meaning of separately taken phraseological unities isolated from the context,

because these word-combinations may be used as free in the direct meaning and as phraseological in the figurative meaning. 3) Phraseological combination (collocation) is a construction or an expression in which every word has absolutely clear independent meaning while one of the components has a bound meaning. It means that phraseological combinations contain one component used in its direct meaning while the other is used figuratively. To make an attempt to try; to make haste to hurry; ; . Some linguists who stick to the general understanding of phraseology and refer to it communicational units (sentences) and winged words, define the fourth type of phraseological units. 4) Phraseological expression is a stable by form and usage semantically divisible construction, which components are words with free meanings. These are proverbs, sayings, aphorisms. Marriages are made in heaven you cannot foretell who will marry whom; Still waters run deep quiet people are often very thoughtful; to work very hard and have a lot of work;; , ! (. ) Task. Match the phraseological unit and the type of class according to V. Vinogradovs classification. Phraseological fusion Phraseological unity Phraseological combination Phraseological expression To come home To offer an apology Once in a blue moon East or West, home is best

3.2 Theoretical Perspectives: The Cultural Element The second approach towards phraseology has been developed by Veronika Teliya (1930-2011) who was a Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Linguistics, the Russian Federation. Her interests include not only general and Russian phraseology, but she also worked in the sphere of language theory, semantics, and pragmatics of language units, she was researching nomination issues, and is the author of linguistic and cultural research of paradigms within vocabulary and phraseology. V. Teliya is the author of more than 100 researches but her most known monographs are: ? (What is phraseology?), 1966; : (Types of Language Meanings: Bound Word Meaning in the Language),1981; (The Connotative Aspect of Nominative Units Semantics),1986; : , (Russian Phraseology: Semantic, Pragmatic, and Linguo-Cultural Aspects), 1996. This second strand can be described within a broader anthropocentric paradigm since it includes the cultural dimension and its central assumption is that every language, especially its

figurative meanings, is connected with the reflection of the world-view shared by the linguistic community. The world-view shared by all members of a linguo-cultural community makes possible the generation and comprehension, in a subconscious process of insight, of metaphorical linguistic meanings.V. Teliya and her colleagues (Natalya Bragina, Elena Oparina, and Trina Sandomirskaya) argue that the cultural element must be elaborated in its richness if we want to fully understand and describe phraseology as such. Edward Sapir (1964) was the first to postulate explicitly that language represents and conceptualizes reality in a culturally specific manner, so that individual native languages stand in a relation of complementarity to each other. This idea of linguistic relativity was further developed by Whorf ( 1956). However, for a long time linguistic relativity was viewed as a linguistic-philosophical concept rather than a purely linguistic one. Phraseology is an exceptional material of focus for linguo-cultural analysis. It is a domain of linguistic study which to a high degree illustrates the correlation between language and culture.This is especially true of restricted lexical collocations, to which the analyst cannot do full justice unless cultural meanings are taken into account. The perception of the world, certain traditions and norms are preserved in the language as the main means of their communication to the following generations. Therefore, phraseology is a crucial mechanism contributing to the formation and reinforcement of a cultural identity. Thus, this study suggests a new direction for phraseological research - that is, linguocultural studies, or the analysis of phraseological units for cultural data as represented in linguistic meanings. Linguo-cultural analysis -- conducted on a systematic basis -- is best suited for phraseology, and especially for restricted lexical collocations. V. Teliya and her colleagues suggest that there are various channels through which language is penetrated by culture. 1. One is the cultural 'seme' (or 'semantic component'). Brought together under this heading are words and word combinations that denote idioethnic realia. Here, a cultural element constitutes part of the total meaning of the word or word-combination, reflecting encyclopaedic knowledge of the material or historical realia it denotes (the cultural seme reflects general knowledge about the realia). Examples include material, social, and historical realia. 2. A second channel is the cultural concept. Cultural concepts are abstract notions (such as English 'conscience' or 'honour') which construct the world-picture in a culturally specific way. Significantly, their specificity is implemented at the cognitive, not the semantic level. Within this group we differentiate between concepts proper and subconcept. Concepts proper largely coincide in all European languages but, for some aspects of meaning, corresponding words and phraseologisms show a high degree of cultural specificity, for example, vs conscience: Ukrainian does not imply only the differentiation between evil and good and the English concept but also presupposes the presence of God in ones sole. Subconcepts are fragments of concepts proper, when abstract notions are verbalized in concrete nouns . V. Teliy suggests the following example to illustrate a subconcept. Thus, baba, 'a human (lower-class) female' (colloq. or derog.), is a concrete noun, originally the name for a peasant woman.

Later, the word came to designate a complex of properties assumed to pertain to women in general. Thus, baba is a subconcept of the the concept of 'femininity' which has no translation equivalent in English. (The notion will be described in greater detail below.) 3. The major channel, however, is cultural connotation, since it draws on both semes and concepts. (Consult her research . - / .
// . . . .: , 1993. . 302 314) It has to do with the interpretative relationship between linguistic items and such symbols

of non-verbal codes as stereotypes or myths. Connotation is especially noteworthy in restricted collocations and idioms. In the former, its activation is tied to the cultural information contained in the base of the collocation (often a noun), and the nature of the semantic specialization of the collocate (often a modifier). According to V. Teliya (1993), cultural connotation arises from an associative relation between the image contained in the inner form of a language sign (Potebnya 1905) and the content of a cultural pattern. A recent example is arkhitektary / kapitany perestroyki ('architects/captains of perestroika'), where cultural connotation is linked to the metaphorical interpretation of political reform as construction or seafaring. Cultural connotations can also arise from the interpretation of concepts or subconcepts. , lit. 'one's conscience began to see' or 'woke up'; , lit. 'a sore conscience', i.e. an uneasy conscience. Cultural connotations are generated by metaphor, when moral constraints (conscience) are conceptualized as if they are a living being that can see and feel pain. Such metaphorical conceptualization can easily be traced to the religious notion of the living soul. The interaction between the denomination and the background religious belief is what provides the content of cultural connotation. Cultural connotations can also derive from the interpretation of subconcepts. For instance, (), lit. 'men's (male) friendship', connotes that males are ideal bearers of genuine friendship, while in (aa), lit. 'a market-place (lower-class) woman', the collocator creates the connotation 'ill-bred and loud-mouthed'. 4. Cultural background. Cultural background refers to information that is most difficult to formalize, as it is connected with semantics in a very indirect and still unexplored way. We say that a word or a word-combination has 'cultural background' when it possesses a clearly discernible ideological aura associated with a historical situation, a political movement, a fashionable trend, and so on. Such entities could be compared to visual symbols and emblems. Thus, russkaya berezka,lit. 'a Russian birch tree' is unmistakably identified by native speakers as a symbol of the motherland. 5. Discourse stereotypes. The development of culture involves the repetition, reinterpretation, and multiplication of texts, as well as the creation of new ones. These texts, pertaining to different discourse types (which are described below, with respect to the process of generation of restricted collocation), exert a powerful influence over culture, while cultural change causes the reproduction and reinterpretation of discourse stereotypes in speech practices. Such mutual exchange cannot but affect language. The lexicon, the repository of forms, 'freezes' and organizes certain expressions which regularly occur in different discourse types. Among the forms stored in the lexicon are lexical collocations that could be interpreted

as 'open' word-combinations, if certain cultural stereotypes did not exist which restricted their use. Thus, in a number of cases, cultural data contained in a language unit can be elicited from knowledge of a text, or of a corpus of texts, in which the concept was first described. For instance, the notion of ', lit. 'first love', is clearly associated in the minds of native speakers of Russian with the story by Ivan Turgenev. The expression connotes pure, delicate, refined, and hopeless passion between a sexually inexperienced girl and youth, a love that cannot be consummated, an extremely lyrical combination of desire and innocence. Indeed, is a restricted lexical collocation because it is a cultural reflection of the (textual) situation within a specific historical and social context. Cultural markedness through association with different discourse types: religious, philosophical, literary, poetic folklore, political discourse. 3.3 Phraseology in Written and Spoken Corpora Rosamund Moon and Bengt Altenberg have both been involved for some years in the analysis of large-scale written and/or spoken corpora. Moon, whose research -- as here -- is often linked to her work as a lexicographer, adopts a descriptive approach which is multidimensional and theoretically flexible. She demonstrates that corpus data can be used as fruitfully for investigating the behaviour of a set of items already assembled as it can for identifying such items in the first place. The starting point of her study is the observation that while 'grammatical' collocations such as at last, in time, and in fact have very high frequencies in corpus data, the more colourful, stylistically marked expressions -- apart from occurring infrequently -- are often lexically or structurally manipulated in the contexts in which they appear. Furthermore, idioms in the strict sense (bite the dust, spill the beans) are exceedingly rare. Overall, there seem to be strong correlations between frequency, form, idiomaticity type, and discourse function. Especially interesting are the results of correlating frequency with phraseological type. Moon sets up three subcategories within her general class of 'phrasal lexemes'. These are 'anomalous collocations', two of whose subtypes (illustrated by beg the question and on show/ display) correspond closely to the 'restricted collocations' recognized in other studies; 'formulae' (which include sayings, proverbs, and similes); and metaphors (which can be transparent, semi-transparent, or opaque -- i.e. fully idiomatic). Certain findings bear out those of other analysts (e.g. Howarth 1996): that most metaphors, for instance, have very low levels of occurrence (here less than one per million), while the most commonly occurring items are likely to be anomalous collocations of some kind. In an analysis spanning a broad range of categories, Moon discusses in greatest depth lexical phrasal lexemes -- that is, those consisting of two or more open-class words and functioning at or below clause level. Moons analysis suggests that around 5% of her set of phrasal lexems are polysemous. Polysemy is more strongly associated with anomalous collocations and adverbial groups; very few are truly ambiguous in context. Around 40% of the expressions in the Hector corpus did not have frozen and fixed canonical forms, and this figure

will be the same or even higher in larger corpora. This has serious implications for teaching, lexicography, and such matters as the automatic or computational detection of such items in corpora. Bengt Altenberg was dealing mainly with the phraseology of spoken English on the basis of recurrent word-combinations in the London-LundCorpus of Spoken English. Recurrent word-combinations are a continuous string of words occurring more than once in identical from. An important part of Bengt Altenberg's description is concerned with the pragmatic, and specifically with the range of commonplace clauses which regularly occur in spoken English as signals of agreement, acknowledgement, thanks, and so on. Grammatically, these word-combinations represent a wide range of structures. It is useful to distinguish the following broad categories: Full clauses (independent / dependent); Clause constituents (multiple / single): the majority of the recurrent word-ombinations in the sample do not constitute full clauses but sequences of two or more clause constituents, such as and you know, and then I, there is a, just sort of, of course is, to do it, it at all. Incomplete phrases Interestingly, the independent clauses typically function as responses, and more specifically as a range of speech-act types such as 'thanks', 'reassurance', or 'agreement', thus constituting a category which resembles Glser's routine formulae. Few of the full-clause examples seem to be entirely opaque and invariable, and even those expressions with a fixed core generally allow some -- admittedly limited -- expansion. Generally, what chiefly serves to define their phraseological character -- and that of dependent clauses also -- is their pragmatic specialization: even if they are not fully lexicalized, they represent conventional means of conveying specific pragmatic meanings. The great majority of word-combinations in the sample, however, are not clauses but word sequences below that level, and, of these, the great bulk realize a succession of two or more clause elements (thus subject + verb). Altenberg classifies the sequences according to a positional scheme which specifies both the clause elements (e.g. adverbial, complement) which they realize and the textual functions (e.g. stem, rheme) which they fulfil. Here he refers to a division, which is methodologically as well as theoretically crucial, between a thematic starting point containing given information (and followed by some frame-setting element) and the propositional core conveying new information. The former element is made up of items taken from a limited stock of frequently utilized items -- which Altenberg's methods are well suited to retrieving -- while the latter is more variable, less stereotyped, and thus less easily captured. Although Altenberg's study focuses for the most part on combinations with a functional or pragmatic role, his findings echo several of those reached by analysts concerned with collocations and idioms at the propositional core of the utterance. The first is that prefabricated expressions pervade all levels of linguistic organization -- lexical, grammatical, pragmatic and affect all kinds of structures, from entire utterances to simple phrases. The second is that there are relatively few examples that are completely invariable or opaque.