FOOD CODE OF CULTURE IN ENGLISH, UKRAINIAN AND GREEK PHRASEOLOGY

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of phraseological units with food component in the context of linguo-culturology. The final aim of the work is to describe and compare the linguistic, cultural and national peculiarities of food component in English, Greek and Ukrainian phraseological units thus revealing linguocultural food code of each linguo-culture. The objective determined the tasks of the research: to define the terms “phraseological unit”, “linguo-cultural code”, “linguo-culturology”, “food”, “nutrition”; to describe the fragments of English, Greek and Ukrainian linguistic world image through the phraseological units with food component; to single out the most frequent food components in English, Greek and Ukrainian phraseology and to define their connotative and semantic meaning; to divide the investigated material into groups according to the names and semantics of food components; to give linguo-cultural description of each of the abovementioned groups. Research has been done on the basis of the English and Ukrainian Phraseological Dictionary by K. Barantsev, Shortened Greek and Russian Phraseological Dictionary by O.V. Patrunova and Phraseological Dictionary of Ukrainian Language. The volume of the investigated material is 835 English phraseological units, 340 Greek phraseological units and 487 Ukrainian phraseological units obtained by consecutive selection. Our study relies substantially on the application of linguistic descriptive methodology and devices. The paper singles out the most frequent lexical groups : food, actions of cooking, feeding and eating, bakery, kitchen utensils, physical properties of food, drinks, cooking techniques, et cetera, with food prevailing (40,8% in English, 33% in Greek and 34,7% in Ukrainian). The most frequent food components are to eat (5,8%), τρώω (to eat) (17,6%) and їсти (8,9%), which proves that basic frequent food components in the researched languages mostly coincide.