Phraseological Units Denoting External Characteristics of a Person in English and Russian

Authors’ names:

  • Lidiya G. Tsallaeva, Tatiana N. Fedulenkova – Alexander and Nikolay Stoletov Vladimir State University, Vladimir, Russia

Abstract:

The article presents the results of a study of modern phraseological units that denote some external characteristic of a person. The study is based on the comparative approach to phraseology, developed in the 1970s by the Moscow Linguistic School, which at the time was headed by Professor V. D. Arakin, an outstanding polyglot linguist who had a good command of more than two dozen languages and trained a large number of followers and disciples. Due to the development of international contacts and the intensification of the study of phraseology in individual languages, comparative studies in phraseology have become particularly wide-spread in the recent decades. This article focuses on English and Russian phraseological units which denote some external characteristic of a person. The relevance of comparative research in the field of phraseology lies, on the one hand, in the need to fill the lack of data for constructing typological passports of languages and, on the other hand, in applying its results to creating a typological passport of a particular language. The study examined 400 English and Russian phraseological units (PUs) denoting external characteristics of a person with the goal to determine the proportion of such phraseological units in each of the languages and to pro-vide their quantitative analysis. The research was based on general research methods and the method of phraseological identification proposed by A. V. Kunin, the founder of phraseology as an independent linguistic discipline. The results of the study are presented in the table of comparative usage of the analyzed PUs in English and Russian, which shows that, in both English and Russian, the largest number of PUs denoting external characteristics of a person describe a person’s external attractiveness and their general build, while the smallest in proportion are those PUs that denote the person’s age and height. The results of the study may serve as a starting point for expanding the research to phraseological units that characterize the inner world of a person.

Section LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
DOI: 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2024-65-1-146-160
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Key words characteristic phraseological units; external feature; English; Russian; comparative study; quantitative ratio
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