Poliova, Svitlana

English

Цифровий репозиторій ХНАМГ (KNAME Digital Repository)

Svitlana Poliova Kamyanets-Podilsky Ivan Ohienko National University  Linguistic peculiarities of life conceptualization in english idioms  Idioms of every language reflect public and cultural experience of the people. Figurative thought is the main reason of idioms formation. That is why objective reality reflected in these units deals with people’s spiritual world, their intellectual experience. It is clear that a human being is in the center of language and culture spaciousness, so the main concepts are those dealing with a human being. The most important, without any doubt, is the multi-faceted concept LIFE. Life may refer to the ongoing process of living things; the period between the birth (or a point at which the entity can be considered to be living) and death of an organism; the condition of an entity that has been born and has yet to die; and that, which makes a living thing alive. Idioms with LIFE component and those dealing with life reflect positive or negative attitude towards life. So, the group of idioms reflecting negative attitude outnumbers the opposite one. It may be explained by the historical events (wars, famines), cultural reasons and values, peculiarities of the national character etc. Based on the dictionary definitions the following elements of the concept LIFE were found out: the time somebody is alive; the state of being alive; the way somebody lives; a particular situation; social / personal / sexual etc life; human existence; the time when something exists / works; living things; life and death; game; activity; interest / excitement; prison; art; book / film. So in the course of its development, the original meaning of the word life has been suppressed from the position of the denotative meaning to the position of the connotative. Idioms with concept LIFE also describe periods of life of every person. In this phrasal-semantic group we can find out such subgroups: birth, marriage, age death, standard of life, way of life, result, troubles, help, hope, health, importance, suffering, etc. Having analyzed idioms with concept LIFE in English, we came to conclusion that the nominative space represented in them is defined by the system of multileveled language units.  

Linguistic peculiarities of life conceptualization in english idioms

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Цифровий репозиторій ХНАМГ (KNAME Digital Repository)