Phrasemes as signs of secondary nomination and the result of phraseosemiosis

Abstract

The article presents the historiography of the issue connected to the terminological essence of phraseological units and the discussion concerning the development of their optimal classification, which took place among the representatives of historical-etymological, systemic-structural and functional-pragmatic/parametric phraseology. The results of searches in the field of phraseology are systematized through the prism of historical and etymological studies, and it is concluded that the efforts of linguists were aimed at reconstructing the origin of its units. Arguments are presented in favour of the universal nature of the classification of stable compounds, developed by L. H. Skrypnyk within the framework of system-structural syntax, where their differentiation according to the models of word combinations and sentences of different types was proposed as a basis. At the same time, special attention is focused on the concept developed by N. M. Amosova and presented in her work that studies the basics of English phraseology, where the author argued for the important role of context for a grammar-based combination of words that makes up a fixed expression of a specific language, English in particular, in which the degree of word autonomy is much higher than in other languages due to its analyticity. Besides, the paper deals with the prerequisites for shifting the emphasis in phraseological studies to the functional-parametric approach, which application contributed to broadening the view of the essence of phraseological units based on two criteria: the criterion of their reproducibility and the criterion of wordiness.The discussion about the choice of the optimal term to designate the object of phraseology in the broad sense is summarized and it is linguistically substantiated that such a multifunctional hyperonym is the term “phraseologism” and its full semantic equivalent – the phraseme, formed by analogy with linguistic terms with an -emic component.The evolution of the term “phraseme” in the conditions of the formation of a new cognitive-discursive phraseology, where the concept of phraseosemiosis is included in its scientific definition, is considered in detail. It is proved and demonstrated on the concrete example of the English phraseme with a quantitative component “baker’s dozen (13)” that the result of this process is a phraseme as a sign of secondary nomination, the internal form of which encodes features that concentrate in a stable form valuable and figurative meanings of the national worldview and ethno-unique features of national life and national spirit, verbalized according to the laws of the lexical-semantic and grammatical systems of each language and easily reproduced in the minds of speakers of this language in the form of ready-made compounds.