Stable Autochthonous Polylexical Units with Extralinguistic Motivation in the Motivational Phraseological Dictionary

Abstract

The problem of the motivation of the linguistic sign is more and more in sight of European linguistics, in the direction of even creating a new discipline, motivational linguistics. In the Motivational Phraseological Dictionary, Chisinau, 2023, whose author is the undersigned, it is proposed to conceive the genesis of stable polylexical units by indicating the type of motivation - the extralinguistic one, as well as by the aspect of their origin, they being indigenous and general. Indigenous polylexical units refer to the realities of the surrounding world: what describe daily life; what concerns professions and trades; with reference to man's exterior world; related to fauna; having military lexis; related to natural phenomena; taboo expressions. In the given communication, we will focus on some components of the given polylexical units that express some indigenous Romanian symbols and motifs, they being part of the language culture of our people. The motivation behind the origin of some stable polylexical units (SPU) is explained by the fact that they appeared on their own land, being indigenous, having their origin in the Romanian language, even if they have counterparts in other languages. When they appeared, SPU were initially denominative language units, motivated, when they named certain concrete facts from the surrounding world, or connotative units, motivated, in the case that the speaker expresses his/her attitude towards a certain fact in life. With the time, along with the evolution of language and society, some motivated SPU have remained motivated, their components or one of them keeping the meaning. The explanation lies in the fact that only these language units can name certain lexical and grammatical values, contribute to the elimination of equivocation, etc.