Comparative phraseological units: features of the subclass (by an example of the German language)

Abstract

The article analyzes the features of comparative phraseological units, which are distinguished by researchers into a separate subclass existing in different languages. The relevance of the topic is confirmed by the unquenchable interest in comparative phraseological units from the linguistic point of view and a new perspective of their consideration within the framework of the author's phraseology in works of artistic discourse. The article identifies cognitive mechanisms common to different linguocultures that underlie the structure of comparative phraseological units, as well as national and cultural differences manifesting in semantic variation where there is lexical equivalence of comparative phraseological units in different languages. In this regard, the importance of the culture-oriented and the research approach by the translation of comparative phraseological units is emphasized. A comprehensive analysis of comparative phraseological units as a phraseology phenomenon is necessary for an adequate consideration of their place within the author's phraseology on the basis of selected works of the German-speaking Swiss writer Urs Widmer. Artistic discourse is presented as a literary communicative phenomenon, actualizing linguistic parameters. The selected works are saturated with phraseological units demonstrating examples of language game at the phraseological level, while in quantitative terms, comparative phraseological units make up a small percentage 13 % and 10 %, respectively, of the total volume of phraseological units in two texts. It is noted that not all comparative phraseological units used by Widmer are recorded in dictionaries. The author of the article assigns them to this subclass not only due to the presence of formal signs (structure, idiomaticity), but also on the basis of the corpus approach, which reveals enough evidence of the prevalence of comparative phraseological units in the language. Among the methods used, it is also necessary to note content analysis and a comparative approach, which enables to draw parallels between different languages (between German, Russian and English). It is stated that in spite of all the expressiveness of comparative phraseological units, their rigid logical structure limits the game potential and excludes them from the language game, which the author implements in the works selected for analysis.