National and Cultural Marking of Russian and Chinese Phraseological Units with Nominations of Alcoholic Beverages

Abstract

In this article, we describe from linguocultural point of view phraseological units of the Russian and Chinese languages with the nominations of alcoholic beverages, which form a separate group in the thematic field “Food”; we are taking into account the priority of the anthropocentric paradigm in modern linguistics. We also study the degree of their phraseoactivity, carry out a comparative analysis of set expressions in order to identify the universal and unique in the semantics and figurativeness of these units, and consider the main types of interlingual correlation (coincidences and discrepancies) of phraseological units. The material of the study was represented by 107 Russian and 95 Chinese phraseological units with the nomination/nominations of alcoholic beverages selected in accordance with a wide understanding of phraseology by continuous sample from one- and bilingual phraseological, linguistic, explanatory and etymological dictionaries of the Chinese and Russian languages. The analysis of the studied material showed that a distinctive feature of Russian phraseologisms is a variety of nominations of alcohol (вино ‘wine’, пиво ‘beer’, мед ‘mead’, водка ‘vodka’, брага ‘mash’, хмельное ‘hoppy’), the presence of diminutive variants of the names, as well as the use of various seeds in the composition one expression. The most phraseoactive in Russian sustainable expressions is the вино (‘wine’) component (about 55 %) in two meanings: ‘grape wine’ and ‘vodka’. In the Chinese phraseology, the general designation of alcohol 酒 [jiǔ] (‘alcohol’; ‘alcoholic drinks’;‘vodka’) constitutes 95 %, all other nominations include this morpheme and are presented by isolated phenomena. The anthropocentric nature of phraseological units is reflected in the description of the properties of a human nature, personal qualities, emotional and physical state, the characteristics of social behavior and interpersonal relations. In relations of partial equivalence, about 10 % of the studied phraseologisms are located, 90 % are non-equivalent units with national and cultural originality, which is manifested in structural, grammatical, lexical, stylistic, semantic properties, as well as in figurative component.