Variability of Russian phraseological units with personal names

Abstract

The topic of variability is one of the most demanded in the field of phraseology, since the interrelation of variability and stability is the essential characteristic of phraseological expressions as reproducible language expressions. The relevance of the research is the need to study the trends of phraseological changes, including new approaches to systematizing these changes, which requires the development of methods and techniques of analyzing different types of variability. The aim is to analyze the phenomenon of phraseological variation on the material of phraseological units with anthroponyms, identify types of variation of anthroponyms as parts of phraseological units, describe the traditional and occasional nature of changes and determine the boundaries between variations and autonomous units. With the help of analytic-descriptive method, semantic analysis of dictionary definitions, contextual analysis and corpus method, the role of anthroponymic component in the semantics and structure of phraseological units and the significance of this component variation for changing phraseological units and defining them as variants or autonomous units are characterized. The usual and occasional nature of variation is shown. The following types of variation of the component-anthroponym are identified and examined in detail: variation of forms (onym or its forms); lexical variation (onym/onym; onym/appellative; no lexical variation of onym); syntactic variation. The first type is represented by phonetic, word-formation, morphological, structural variation of the units. Lexical variation is manifested, as a rule, in the substitution of assonant names, including names with gender inversion. Syntactic variation associated with quantitative changes in onyms leads to figurative and structural-semantic changes, modification of the unit, its convergence with phraseological schemes. The analysis of the impact of certain changes in the anthroponymic component on the semantic identity of phraseological units allows to determine the status of phraseological units as variants or autonomous units. The study shows that the anthroponym within phraseological units of different types is a representative component in describing the phenomenon of phraseological variation. In the future, the types of variation of the anthroponym identified may classify the types of Russian phraseological units variation, as well as identify the specificity of variation of phraseological units in other languages.

Keywords

• russian phraseology
• variability
• synonymy
• anthroponyms
• personal names
• appellatives
• autonomous units
• precedent names