КРЕАТИВНІСТЬ ІДІОМАТИЧНОГО ПРОСТОРУ СОЦІАЛЬНОЇ ІНТЕРАКЦІЇ

Abstract

The present paper is a study of creativity of idiomatic space in the national varieties of English. The defi nition of the term ‘idiomatic space of social interaction’ has been suggested, formulated as “the property of the idiomatic space of social interaction to, either individually or collectively, form new idiomatic units or to adjust them according to the pragmatic and communicative goals of discourse”, and is further investigated in the News on the Web (NOW) corpus evidenced from canonical and non-canonical forms of the idiom have your cake and eat it (too). In total, 1158 instances of the use of the above idiom were investigated in fi ve national varieties of English (British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, and New Zealand English). Based on the data obtained, it was discovered that canonical forms of the idiom under analysis prevail over non-canonical forms (79.8% to 20.2%). Further, this was verifi ed with the help of concordance analysis using AntConc freeware corpus analysis toolkit, which showed minor deviations of the idiom from its base form. However, despite being in the minority, the non-canonical forms of have your cake and eat it (too) lend themselves to a rigorous analysis from the standpoint of the conceptual integration theory. One such instance of conceptual blending – to have their cake and eat it and then expect to still have it to eat later on when they’re hungry. And a bag to put it in – was considered in the present paper. The overall analysis has proved the applicability of the conceptual integration theory to idiomatic creativity in terms of idiomatic inputs and blends. Since no direct blends inv olving the above idiom were identifi ed in the NOW corpus, a wider context of the idiom (at least two or three sentences along with the title of the relevant publication) was considered. This provides certain evidence to hypothesize that the conceptual integration theory is not a universal one when it comes to interpreting idiomatic creativity. With this in mind, further quantitative and qualitative analyses are needed to rigorously determine the place of the conceptual integration theory in examining idiomatic creativity. Key words: study of idioms, idiomatic space, corpus analysis, conceptual integration theory, creativity of idiomatic space.