STRUCTURAL-SEMANTIC PECULARITIES OF PHRASES WITH THE “CAT” COMPONENT (BASED ON FRENCH, ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES)

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation of structural and semantic pecularities of french, english and ukrainian phrases with the “cat” component. Phraseologisms are an important layer of any language, which function both in colloquial and literary variants, filling with new meaning. Scientific achievements in the studied phraseology of individual languages give a reason to emphasize the presence of various universals in it, and from this it becomes possible to highlight the phenomena of general phraseology. It is from this point of view that this work examines the theoretical foundations of general phraseology as an integral part of the systems of individual languages. One of the sources of enrichment of the literary language with expressive and pictorial possibilities is the national idiomatic heritage, in particular, zoosemic phraseological units. The article examines the current state of developments in the field of modern philology regarding the concept of phraseologism, the peculiarities of the functioning of a phrase with a zoonym component based on the material of modern French, English, and Ukrainian languages. A comparative analysis of the variability of the formation and structural-semantic divergence of the studied units with the “cat” component proves that the inclusion of zoonyms in the phraseology testifies to the important role of animals in the general interpretive picture of the world, which is determined by the traditional model of the transfer of animal qualities to humans and vice versa. The conducted research is based, in particular, on the classification of factual material according to grammatical features, which allows one to clearly understand the similarities and differences in the formation of the corresponding phrases. The few works of domestic and foreign linguists in this field are mainly devoted to the general study of animalisms of all classes. However, they do not fully reflect the role of such representatives of the fauna as the cat in creating the linguistic identity of the nation. To date, there is a lack of comprehensive works that would trace the structural and semantic features of the functioning of zoonyms as part of phraseological units on the material of several languages, which proves the relevance of our research.