Regularities in the Behaviour of Russian Phrasal Idioms by Natalia Tronenko (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 567 saved in Sweden (1.3,p. 4f ). In thiscontext I.Agren's study on theParaenesis of Ephraim the Syrian is mentioned, but not her concordance, which undoubtedly ismore relevant for the study of the Slavonic translation of Gospel books (I. Ljusen, Gre?sko-staroslayjanskij konkordansk drevnejsimspiskam slavjanskogo perevoda evangelij, Uppsala, 1995). In the chapter on the ECG's calendar itwould have been useful if Varpio had considered O. V. Loseva's Russ/?e mesjaceslovy XI-XIV vekov (Moscow, 2001). This would have avoided such untenable arguments as the following: that commemorations of Russian saints and feasts were rarely mentioned in themenologia of liturgical books until themiddle of the sixteenth century (pp. 79, 81). According to Loseva's studies, the commemoration for Feodosij Pecerskij, for example, isfixed in calendars of fifteen, forBoris and Gleb, in more than fifty Gospel books from the eleventh to fifteenthcenturies (Loseva, pp. 350-91. See also the chapter 'Russkie prazdniki', pp. 87-119). The com memoration forTheodosios Coinobiarches has been mistakenly placed under the feasts 'original toRus" (p. 79). Contrary toVarpio's claim (p. 81), the Athonite Saints Peter and Athanasius are in factmentioned inEast Slavonic calendars prior to the sixteenth century (Loseva, p. 36of, 375). A mistake con cerning theGreek form of the name of StMartinian (Moepxiavo? instead of the correct form Mocpxivzocvoc) led the author to assume an intervocalic -m- as an East Slavonic language feature (MApTHM?ifcHMA, Varpio, p. 108 ? cf. the Greek form of the name in MHNAIA TOY OAOY ENIAOYTOY, TOMOE r, Rome, 1889, pp. 580, 584. The Slavonic form was already fixed as MApTM/ZMANT? inmanuscripts of the twelfthcentury: cf.Gottesdienstmen?umfur den Monat Februar, Teil 2, ed. von H. Rothe, Paderborn, 2006, pp. i26n, 234, 271). In her textological classification of theEC G (chapter seven) the author fails to consider the fact that theGospel texts she compares have been testified in different types of books (tetraevangel ? aprakosevangel ? lectionary ? com plete bible) with different liturgical functions (use inmonastic or non-monastic services/without liturgical function). The question also remains as towhether the affinitybetween theGospel text from theEC G and that from theOstrog Bible ? both of East Slavonic origin and written between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries ? can really be established on the basis of the glossary of the Codex Marianus, a South Slavonic manuscript of the eleventh century, as Varpio attempts. All in all, Varpio's book gives a meticulous and detailed description of the ECG, making another codex ofRuthenian literature of the early seventeenth century known to a wider public. The results of the author's linguistic and accentologic studies will be relevant for studies in language and literature of the Carpatho-Ukrainian resp. East Slovakian area. Patristische Kommission D. Christians NRW Akademie derWissenschaften, Bonn Tronenko, Natalia. Regularities in the Behaviour ofRussian Phrasal Idioms. Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern and New York, 2004. 298 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?34.00 (paperback). As early as 1968W. L. Chafe wrote that idiomaticity is 'an anomaly in the Chomskyan paradigm' (pp. 28, 237), and it iseasy to seewhy this should be so. 568 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 According to the procedures of transformational-generative (TG) grammar, themeaning of a sentence or phrase is arrived at lexical item by lexical item, depending on the position which each lexical item occupies in the sentence or phrase's treediagram. In thisway the discovery of themeaning of syntactic structures is an accumulative process, to which each lexical item contributes its own discrete semantic load. Such syntactic structures are termed 'com positional'. Idiomatic sentences or phrases, on the other hand, are 'non compositional' in the sense that the successive addition of the semantic load of their lexical items yields either an inappropriate literalmeaning or nonsense: what it is not capable of producing is their idiomatic meaning. The current incapacity ofTG grammar in thisarea, i.e. itsfailure to distin guish idiomatic phraseology from literalphraseology and to come up with the idiomatic meaning of a sentence or phrase when that iswhat is required, is a significantweakness inTG grammar theory.As the author rightlycomments, 'idiomsmust not be disregarded as a peripheral phenomenon' (p. 241). Indeed not. They pervade all...