On the lines of modeling phraseological units

Abstract

From the very beginning of the development of phraseology as a separate area of Russian linguistics, the descriptive modeling of phraseological units has been widely undertaken. Meanwhile the construction of their generative models has always raised questions and been realized on a limited scale. This restriction is brought about by the high degree of idiomaticity of the core units in the phraseological system, preventing the formation of semantic regularities and defying systematization on a wide scale. The cognitive approach to a phraseological unit, based on the frame structure of the latter, allows us to construct generative models both for large and relatively small groups of phraseological units, their size depending on the degree of generalization of the frame components. The idiom models under consideration in this article comprise the invariant frames of meaning and literal meaning, which reflect relatively concrete situations and are incorporated into the processes of conceptual integration. The focus of attention is primarily the semantic regularities discovered in some groups of idioms, which proves the existence of two contrary and asymmetrical tendencies. On the one hand, the dominant tendency towards the formation of idioms isolated from each other by their unique semantics and deprived of any regularity in their formation, on the other hand, the limited tendency towards the manifestation of semantic regularities resulting from conceptual ones. The regularities revealed in the formation of idiom semantics are the consequence of analogue processes of thinking and interpreting the acquired knowledge, which inevitably initiates the development of regularities even in those parts of the language system where they are least expected. The established conceptual and semantic regularities give reasons to suppose that the construction of generative models of idiom formation is fully justified in some cases, despite the limited range of their function in the phraseological system. These regularities also allow us to use the notion of a potential idiom alongside that of a potential word.