Phraseological units – ways to express national spirit or differences in nomination? (as illustrated by German, English and Russian languages)

Abstract

The role of a language as a mirror reflecting national culture and global view of the world by its speakers has long been in the center of researchers’ attention, sparking multiple heated discussions in the academic community. Following the traditions of cognitive approach to language studies, the present article makes an attempt to unveil and analyze the essence of phraseological units from two opposing standpoints – as fixed expressions accumulating the specific features of a national spirit and thus forming the language-based view of the world by different nations, or as ways to describe various aspects of the same things through different nomination means. The research covers a limited number of German, English and Russian phraseological units, all of which are based on the same inner concept of «SURROUNDINGS» and, in most cases, are connected with the idea of «wallpaper» (ger. «Tapete», rus. «обои») as its outer lexical correlative. The phraseological units under research include some new words and phrases that have emerged recently in connection with the development of remote communication technologies and have not entered dictionaries by now. Special attention is given to the inner structure and contextual use of similar phraseological units in different languages, as well as the interrelation between their common and unique components. The discovered cross-language connections are shown as a word net with the constituent elements possessing complex semantic structure (yet based on the same inner concept) and different aspects of meaning being illuminated or darkened in words and phrases belonging to different languages. This points to the blurring of boundaries between phraseological units originating from different languages within the same conceptual framework and leads to conclusion that not all differences between languages may be caused by culture-specific variations.

Keywords

• language-based view of the world
• phraseological units
• metaphors
• cross-language connections
• inner concept
• semantic structure