Лекция № 3

Methods of investigating phraseological units

Цель занятия: to introduce the methods of investigating phraseological units

Основные вопросы:

1. Contextual method

2. Variation method

3. Complicative method

4. Structural-typological method

5. Methods of synthesis & analysis

Тезисы:

The scholar who has probably done the most to systematise the field of Grace’s idiomatology is Andrew Pawley, very often writing (in the 1980s) together with Francis Syder. In one of their articles they write to say that fluent and idiomatic control of performance in a language results, to a great extent, from the knowledge of a set of ‘sentence stems’ which are ‘institutionalised’ or ‘lexicalised’. As a matter of fact, they understood the ‘set’ as a unit like a clause, or even one of a longer stretch, whose form and lexical content are fixed. Later they introduced the notion of speech formula, which meant a conventional link of a particular formal construction and a particular conventional idea. Let us notice here that the very term ‘formula’ is widely used by linguists in various subtle meanings and specifications; however, it seems to be a sort of cover term embracing what might simply be called an idiomatic expression. Thus, if understood correctly, in Pawley and Syder’s view all genuine idioms are speech formulas, but not all speech formulas are idioms. In psycholinguistic terms, accepted by the two scholars, true idioms are such speech formulas that are semantically non-compositional and, to make their view complete, idioms are syntactically non-conforming. This opinion naturally obtains for the present paper. However, even if ‘non-conformity’ in syntax is understandable fairly well as the fact of the expression’s grammatical peculiarity, ‘non-compositionality’ requires some comment. Undoubtedly, there may be idioms, which are at least partly compositional; yet this is another story.⁴

There are two or three things worth pointing out in connection with Grace, Pawley and Syder, and others. Let us note that while Grace tried to offer a serious, purely linguistic description of what is called here ‘idiomatic expressions’, Pawley and Syder zeroed in on that kind of language, which was required, and more or less rigidly set, by social convention. They strive to give answers to two points that any speaker should bother about, namely: (1) what can be said appropriately and (2) how it is to be said.⁵ Undoubtedly, the latter concerns form, the former reflects the pragmatic sense. With regard to the ‘pragmatic’ aspect at least two scholars should be mentioned. First, Jürg Strässler (1982), who chose the pragmatic route as an intermediate step in the then prevailing sociolinguistic direction; he defined the idiom as a functional element of language, namely, as a pragmatic phenomenon, i.e. something that is judged from the point of view of the language user. Second, Florian Coulmas (1979, 1981), the true representative of the sociolinguistic group, who worked on the concept of routine formulas; he evidently elaborated the idea of routines as proposed by D. Hymes (1974, 1975), W. Chafe (1968), and his other contemporaries. In a detailed study we would certainly find a lot of ideas shared by such linguists as Uriel Weinreich (1972), Adam Makkai ( 1972), even Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), Dwight Bolinger (1977), and others. Nevertheless, talking about Coulmas it is worth noting that in his opinion an adequate description of a community’s sociolinguistic behaviour must include: (1) idiomaticity, (2) routine, and (3) collocability, which are considered to be significant properties of expression. Coulmas is convinced that every member of a speech community is able to distinguish routine utterances from idiosyncratic ones.

Рекомендуемая литература:

1. Антрушина Г.Б., Афанасьева О.В., Морозова Н.Н. «Лексикология английского языка». М.: Дрофа, 2004

2. Cowie A.P. «Phraseology: Theory, Analysis and Applications». Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998

3. Skandera P. «Phraseology and culture in English». Berlin, New-York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007

4. Кунин А.В. «Курс фразеологии современного английского языка». М.: Высшая школа, 1996