LINGUISTIC AND STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONTENT OF THE IDIOMATIC SPACE OF ENGLISH MILITARY-ORIENTED TEXTS

Abstract

In the article, the author conducts a linguistic and statistical analysis of the idiomatic space of English-language military-oriented texts and an experimental verification of the linguistic features of thephraseological units functioning. In the course of the study, the author used a number of research methods and identified morphological, syntactic, lexical and semantic features of phraseological units used in English-language military-oriented texts. In order to obtain reliable results on the morphology, semantics and structure of phraseological units, 1670 phraseological units were selected in compliance with all the requirements for sampling using mathematical statistics methods. The results of the sample processing have revealed a number of regularities in the idiomatic space of English-language literary texts on military topics, in particular, the most common among the phraseological units are verbal phraseological units, which are more than three times as numerous as substantive ones, eight times as numerous as adjectival phraseological units and more than ten times as numerous as adverbial phraseological units. The author explains this correlation with the description of active military operations in the studied works, which is why verbal phraseology prevails in the texts. In addition, the author distinguishes lexical and semantic fields, in particular the lexical and semantic field of action, features, subject matter, time, feelings and emotions, and conditions. Based on the distribution of phraseological units between lexico-semantic fields and the analysis of the content of each field, the author argues that the greatest accumulation occurs in the following fields: verbal phraseological units in the lexico-semantic field “action”; substantive – in the lexico-semantic field “subject matter”; adjectival – in the lexico-semantic field “feature”; adverbial – in the lexico-semantic field “conditions”; interjections, proverbs, sayings – in the lexical-semantic field “emotions and feelings”. The author proves that there is a connection between the content of classes of phraseological units on the basis of morphological features and the content of the selected lexical and semantic fields of the idiomatic space of literary texts on military topics.