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ELEVATION
It is a transfer of the meaning when it becomes better in the course of time, e.g. «knight» originally meant «a boy», then «a young servant», then «a military servant», then «a noble man». Now it is a title of nobility given to outstanding people; «marshal» originally meant «a horse man» now it is the highest military rank etc.
DEGRADATION
It is a transfer of the meaning when it becomes worse in the course of time. It is usually connected with nouns denoting common people, e.g. «villain» originally meant «working on a villa» now it means «a scoundrel».
HYPERBOLE
It is a transfer of the meaning when the speaker uses exaggeration,
e.g. «to hate»(doing something), (not to see somebody) «for ages».
Hyperbole is often used to form phraseological units, e.g. «to make a mountain out of a molehill», «to split hairs» etc.
LITOTE
It is a transfer of the meaning when the speaker expresses affirmative with the negative or vica versa, e.g. not bad, no coward etc.
PHRASEOLOGY
The vocabulary of a language is enriched not only by words but also by phraseological units. Phraseological units are word-groups that cannot be made in the process of speech, they exist in the language as ready-made units. They are compiled in special dictionaries. The same as words phraseological units express a single notion and are used in a sentence as one part of it. American and British lexicographers call such units «idioms». We can mention such dictionaries as: L.Smith «Words and Idioms», V.Collins «A Book of English Idioms» etc. In these dictionaries we can find words, peculiar in their semantics (idiomatic), side by side with word-groups and sentences. In these dictionaries they are arranged, as a rule, into different semantic groups.
Phraseological units can be classified according to the ways they are formed, according to the degree of the motivation of their meaning, according to their structure and according to their part-of-speech meaning.
WAYS OF FORMING PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS
A.V. Koonin classified phraseological units according to the way they are formed. He pointed out primary and secondary ways of forming phraseological units.
Primary ways of forming phraseological units are those when a unit is formed on the basis of a free word-group :
a) Most productive in Modern English is the formation of phraseological units by means of transferring the meaning of terminological word-groups, e.g. in cosmic technique we can point out the following phrases: «launching pad» in its terminological meaning is «стартовая площадка» , in its transferred meaning - «отправной пункт», «to link up» - «cтыковаться, стыковать космические корабли» in its tranformed meaning it means -«знакомиться»;
b) a large group of phraseological units was formed from free word groups by transforming their meaning, e.g. «granny farm» - «пансионат для престарелых», «Troyan horse» - «компьюторная программа, преднамеренно составленная для повреждения компьютера»;
c) phraseological units can be formed by means of alliteration , e.g. «a sad sack» - «несчастный случай», «culture vulture» - «человек, интересующийся искусством», «fudge and nudge» - «уклончивость».
d) they can be formed by means of expressiveness, especially it is characteristic for forming interjections, e.g. «My aunt!», « Hear, hear !» etc
e) they can be formed by means of distorting a word group, e.g. «odds and ends» was formed from «odd ends»,
f) they can be formed by using archaisms, e.g. «in brown study» means «in gloomy meditation» where both components preserve their archaic meanings,
g) they can be formed by using a sentence in a different sphere of life, e.g. «that cock won’t fight» can be used as a free word-group when it is used in sports (cock fighting ), it becomes a phraseological unit when it is used in everyday life, because it is used metaphorically,
h) they can be formed when we use some unreal image, e.g. «to have butterflies in the stomach» - «испытывать волнение», «to have green fingers» - »преуспевать как садовод-любитель» etc.
Реферат опубликован: 21/06/2009