Reviewed by: Osnovy frazeologii (kratkij kurs): Učeb. Posobie by A. N. Baranov, D. O. Dobrovol’skij Ludmila Pöppel A. N. Baranov and D. O. Dobrovol’skij. Osnovy frazeologii (kratkij kurs): Učeb. Posobie. Moscow: Flinta Nauka, 2013. 312pp. The work under review is devoted to questions of phraseology such as the category of idiomaticity and the idiom, the specific characteristics of phraseology as a special part of the lexicon, the classification of phrasemes (multiword or fixed expressions), features of their semantics, stylistics, and syntactical behavior, the cultural specifics of the phraseology of different languages, aspects of translation, etc. Although the book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, it is obviously also a scholarly monograph addressed to linguistic specialists in phraseology, lexical semantics, and lexicography. Consisting of an introduction and ten chapters, it presents, on the basis of examples and in a lively, accessible form, the basic theoretical problems of phraseology and describes the peculiarities of entire classes of phraseological units. Illustrations are drawn from Russian, often in comparison with other languages, mostly English and German. Problems at the end of each section are intended to help the reader independently analyze phrasemes using the theoretical notions presented in the text. As an additional aid to the reader, each chapter is followed by a brief list of books and articles relevant to the topics treated in that chapter. The book is based on the conception of phraseology developed by the authors over the course of many years and discussed in a number of their scholarly works. Chapter 1, “Istorija frazeologii: Napravlenija issledovanij” (“The History of Phraseology: Lines of Research”), outlines the existing approaches to the description of multiword expressions and assesses their advantages and shortcomings. According to the authors, American linguists have not traditionally and are not presently devoting enough study to phraseology, which may have to do with the powerful influence of behaviorism and generative grammar. In American and to [End Page 153] some extent in West European linguistics, phraseology has traditionally been regarded as a marginal phenomenon that is not concerned with the basic structure of natural languages. In recent years, however, particularly in connection with the rising worldwide popularity of Construction Grammar, it has become clear that language is structured far less regularly and systematically than was previously supposed. There is a great deal in language that is not predictable, which means that the speaker must memorize an enormous number of multiword constructions that cannot be evaluated on the basis of knowledge of the meaning of their components and/or knowledge of productive grammatical rules. It turns out that natural languages are phraseological through and through. And it now iappears that much of what Construction Grammar has discovered is not fundamentally new and previously unknown but has in fact already been described and studied in detail within phraseology, often from different positions and in completely different terms but nevertheless thoroughly and on the basis of a huge body of empirical facts in various languages. Traditional phraseology has often suffered from its neglect and perhaps even ignorance of the latest theoretical linguistic trends and tendencies, existing all by itself, as it were, divorced from current debates within contemporary linguistics. The chapter briefly describes the principal American and European approaches to phraseology. Their main differences and points of intersection include the classification of fixed expressions, their variation, the description of their semantics, structural-syntactic features and provenance, psycholinguistic aspects, the dictionary description of phraseology, comparative phraseology, and phraseology as a cultural phenomenon. All of these areas are intimately interconnected, since they describe one and the same subject. Chapter 2, “Osnovnye ponjatija teoretičeskoj frazeologii” (“The Basic Concepts of Theoretical Phraseology”), addresses the question of how to distinguish phrasemes in the lexical system of language. It discusses in detail the idiomaticity and stability of phrasemes that make phrasemes different from other sorts of lexemes. New concepts are introduced to describe the phenomena of idiomaticity: reinterpretation, opacity (non-transparency), and complex denotation. These three types of idiomaticity are independent of each other but can operate simultaneously. That is, a single phraseme can belong at once to two or three categories. Several types are considered in each category. The essence [End...
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Nov 12, 2024
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