Comparative idioms in Modern English

Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev

Institute of Philology  

Department of English Philology and Intercultural Communication

Course paper

 Comparative idioms in Modern English

Student:

Anastasia Navizivska

2nd year

English Studies and Translation

Supervisor:

Pavlichenko Larysa Vasylivna, PhD

KYIV – 2021 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

“Speak idiomatically unless there is some good reason not to do so.”

John Rogers Searle

The English language has a long history. For centuries, it has accumulated a large number of set expressions that were once uttered by someone and they were liked by people and were fixed in the language, being successful, well-aimed and beautiful.

Phraseological units or idioms, as they are called by most western scholars, can probably be described as the most picturesque, colorful and expressive part of the language vocabulary.

And later the special layer of the language appeared, phraseology, the collection of fixed expressions with their special meaning. The main principles of phraseology as a linguistic discipline were worked out B. Fraser [14], V.V. Vinogradov [2], A.V. Kunin [5] and other linguists. Modern foreign philology is concentrated on the corpus-based studies of idioms, their syntactic peculiarities and cultural context.

Phraseology is a kind of picture gallery which collected vivid sketches of the nation's customs, traditions and prejudices, recollections of its past history, scraps of folk songs and fairy-tales. Quotations from great poets are preserved here alongside the dubious pearls of philistine wisdom and crude slang witticisms, for phraseology is not only the most colorful, but probably the most democratic area of vocabulary that draws its resources mostly from the very depths of popular speech.

V.H. Collins writes in his Book of English Idioms: “In standard spoken and written English today idiom is an established and essential element that, used with care, enriches the language”. [11]

S. Alavi defines idioms as “...multi word expressions which meanings cannot be deduced from the meaning of their parts in a entirely compositional method”. [8, p. 170]

Interpretation of idiomatic expressions by A.V. Kunin defines idioms as rethinking of semantic transformation of literal meaning of the speech and language prototype of a phraseological unit creating phraseological abstraction. Rethinking, being one of the ways of reflection of reality in the human mind, is associated with the playback features reflected by objects on the foundation of communication between them. [5, p. 98]

We adhere to the statement of C. Ren [20] according to which an idiom is a fixed group of words the meaning of which is not clear from the denotation of each single word and can be understood at large, idioms are made of a set of words or phrases. Idioms are a kind of cultural phenomenon. So, they are not the results of the individuals, but they are the results of collective activities and experience of people, which are influenced by politics, trade, crafts, religion, and art, and so on.

Thus, there are many different approaches to the defining idioms.