DO POTOLKA PRYGAT’: Lexical and Grammar Changes of Idioms of Semantic Field of “Joy / Pleasure”

Abstract

The features of the use of Russian idioms related to the semantic field of “Joy / Pleasure” are considered. Based on the analysis of idiomatic expressions (including speech formulas, the meaning of which contains a reference to the situation of communication), selected from lexicographic sources (ideographic dictionaries), the author identifies the main nominal components (somatisms, nouns “joy” and “pleasure” in their direct meanings, etc.), the elements of the figurative component (surface, container, physiological reactions, etc.) of the field of “Joy / Pleasure.” By analyzing examples of the use of phraseological units in the texts extracted from National Corpus of the Russian Language, the most typical lexical and grammatical changes in idioms are revealed, namely: syntactic transformations (inversion and topicalization), lexical modifications (component replacement), lexical and syntactic modifications (definition input). The author comes to the following conclusions: on the one hand, lexical and grammatical changes of idioms are directly caused by the semantics of idioms (for example, with such morphological modification as the change of verbal form); on the other hand, these changes themselves may cause the transformation of the meaning of the idiom for its actualization in the context. In addition, there is a tendency to generalization: on the basis of idioms of this semantic field there are phraseoschemes-intensifiers, which can also apply to other fields (in particular, to the field “Fear”).

Keywords

• phraseology
• emotions
• semantic field of “joy / pleasure”
• lexical and grammatical changes
• modifications of idioms