Furthermre, any language can be characterized by social and regional varieties, each of which serves to convey culturl identity of the corresponding language community. R.W. Langacker states,“Let us in fact admit that every speaker has adistinct idiolect and that no speaker has even passive knowledge of ll hthe varieties spoken or all the structural features tey exhibit” (11, p.230). It is clear then, a language like English, for example, - in all its variegated compexity – cannot exist in any single mind. To be tenable. The position of individual minds has to be understood as ascriding to any one person only a portion of the total knowledge of the language, which might then be identified as the union of the specifications apprehended by individual speakers (11, p.230).
Thus, one can speak of another model of the world – linguistic, which functions to explicate verbally the conceptual picture of the world. It is through the language that experience, gained by individuals, turns into a collectve property, or collective experience. The two models coexist in a very close interaction, though, it should be pointed out, language is not so rich and varied as the conceptual model. Limited in its means of expression, language fails to convey the whole amont of inforation provided by man’s cognition, including various types of thinking. As B.A. Serebrennikov states, “in comparison with the language, thinking is, as a rule, much widr and more flexible. (…) Words are more stable and conservative than notions and in this respect less adequatey reflect the process of world development” (8, p.104)
However, language would be unable to perform its function as means of communications, if it were not capable of conveying relevant conceptual information. So, searching for better maens of expression, language has to resort to “roundabout” ways of nomination: figurative, idiomatic, symbolic expressions and their non-conventional variants which will evoke bright, living associations with particular concepts and thus will activate all relevant knowledge connected wth them and stored in man’s memory.
Culture can be defined as a “design for living hared understandings that people use to co-ordinate their acivities”. Members of a society must share certain basic ideas about the world works, what is important in life, how technology is used, and what their artefacts and their actions mean. Whereas social structure refers to the practical/ instrumental aspects of the social relations, culture refers to the symbolic/expressive aspects of social relations.
Another definition of culture was sggested by goseriu. Culture is the historical objectivity of the spirit in shapes that last, in shapes that turn into traditions that become historc shapes describing man’s own world, man’s own universe. The spirit is nothing lse than activity capable of creation, it is creativity itself, not something that creates but the creative activity as such. Energy, that activity which is anterior to the concept of any dynamism, of any learned or experimented technique. And mman creates culture, he is a creator, he is endowed with energy to the extend to which it goes beyond what man has learnt, beyond what is gained through experience, language, art, religion. Myth. Science, and philosophy. This sum of forms is what we call culture in so far as they are achieved at in history as products of man’s creative activity.
Every language has its own linguistic style or what W. Humboldt alled “Weltansicht”. i.e. a vision of the world. He also demonstrated that language determines thought as well as a particular vision upon the universe. Any linguistic system comprises within itself an analysis of the exterior world, an analysis which is its own and which is different from that of the other languages or from the other stages known by that particular language.
That is why it is utopia to imagine that two words from two different languages presented in the dictionary as the translation of the other one refer to exactly the same thing. Every language was formed within a definite landscape and depending on a distinct and non-repeatable experience. It is a fallacy to assume, for example, that the English expression to call a spade a spade is to be rendered as such into other languages. We need to take into account the fact that when trying to translate, we should preserve the semantic as well as the stylistic equivalencies of what has been expressed in the source text.
The Russian school of Phraseology admits a broad interpretation of its volume and incudes idioms, semi-idioms, phraseomatic units, as well as communicative units – proverbs and sayings.
Part 2. Phraseology and its role in the representation of the collected wisdom of the nation.
1. Phraseology as a language system and linguistic disccipline
According to the definition suggested by Professor A.V. Kunin, Phraseology is a science that focuses on phraseological units stable word combinations with a complicated semantics which are not modeled on structural semantic patterns of free word combinatins. It is a peculiar subsystem of the language which is marked by high informative potentialities and expressive qualities, laconism and figurative character.
Due to the close relation of phraseology to national culture, its great informative and expressive value, Professor A.V. Kunin called this language system “a treasure house of the language” (4, p.5). The outstanding Russian philologist F.I. Buslaev said that where the national-cultural aspects of language, its connection with history, cognitive experience and spiritual life of peple manifest themselves most brighly is phraseology.
Phraseological units fill up lacunas in the lexica system of the language, which is never sufficient enough to name all the variety of things ever known to man, and in many cases are the only nominations of this or that thing. Action, phenomenon or situation. Thanks to their imagery and expressiveness phraseological units manage to smooth the contradictins between man’s boundless thought and and insufficency of the lexical resources. By means of a bright living image of the nominated bject they activate al relevant knowledge associated with it and stored in man’s memory. This cognitive mechanism accounts for the high dgree of informativeness of phraseology its ability to reflect people’s history, cuture and life.
Phraseological units represent the most conservative part of the language as they are not as subject to free varition in speech as exical units. Their stablity,especially semantic invariance, permits to preserv intact all knowledge related to people’s beliefs, views and valus which gave rise to phraseological units and which find manifestation in the meaning of these units. Furthermore, the semantic mechanism of compression inherent in phraseology makes phraseological units very capacious and laconic signs of the language. Praseological meaning, especially that of idioms, accumulates all relevant information concerning the original situation that brought about the corresponding unit. This information is represented in the meaning implicitly in a compressed form – the inherent quality of phraseology whch A. Potebnya called “condensation of thought” (7).
For example, the idiom the prodigal son not only designates the notion “a repentant sinner” but also comprises the content of the biblical parable (Luke 15:11-32) which gave rise to the idiom. Though not present in the foreground of the phrasroligical meaning, this conceptua content is stored in the implicit component of the idiom and serves as its motivating factor. In the same way idioms reflect national-cultural heritage including ethnic beliefs, legends, traditions, folklore and literary works. Thus, the idiom to fight like Kilkenny cats arose in allusion to the legend of the 17th century conflict between the towns Kilkenny and Irishtown in Ireland which ended only after a complete destruction of both. The idiom cakes and ale was coined by Shakespeare in his play “The Twelfth Night” and later popularized by W.S. Maugham in his novel Cakes and Ale. So, phraseological units apparently bear a touch of national culture, so their semantics includes a cultural component: besides their phraseological (linguistic) meaning, phraseological units carry various types of extralingustic information. It comprises knowledge of the world and national culture, beliefs, moral values and stereotypes of the people.
Phraseology is anthropocentric by its nature – semantics of most units revolves around man, his activities, attitudes and traits of character. As it has already been mentioned, man tries to modulate reality as commensurable with himself, tries, so to speak. To humanize the objects of the outer world. That is why many nominations attribute human qualities to animals and unanimated objects and vice versa. A person can be descrbed as stone deaf (absoutely deaf), hard as nails (very cruel and selfish), or a bull in a china shop (very awkward). It’s evident that such phraseological nominations not only designate certain qualities of man, but also do it rather expressively. Identification by means of imagery of man with an animal or a thing permits an idiom to make the nomination intensive, express a very high degree of the designated property.
Here it should be pointed out that despite their evidently important expressive function, phroseological units are in the first place nominative and highly informative signs of the language, which cannot be regarded merely as expressive equivalents of words, so the more as a “decoration”. Just like words phraseological units serve to formulate and verbalize concepts and thus play a significant role in the process of conceptualization. Only, due to the indirect (figurative) type of nomination, they create a specific model of the world which is called by many scholars “phraseological”.
2. Idiomatic language: linguistic and cultural aspects
Before describing the specific features of English idiomatic expressions one needs to clarify the term idiom. An idiom is a set expression (or phrase) whose meaning cannot be deduced from a literal definition of its parts, and instead refers to a non-literal or figurative meaning which is only known through conventional use.
It is likely that every human language has idioms, and very many of them; a typical English commercial idiom dictionary lists about 4,000. When a local dialect of a language contains many highly developed idioms it can be unintelligible to speakers of the parent language; a classic example is that of Cockney rhyming slang. But note that most examples of slang, jargon and catch phrases, while related to idioms, are not idioms in the sense discussed here. Also to be distinguished from idioms are proverbs, which take the form of statements such as, “He who hesitates is lost.” Many idioms could be considered colloquialisms.
In linguistics, idioms are constructs of natural language which contradict the principle of compositionality which more formal languages follow. They are typically classified as figures of speech.
For example, the colloquial English phrase to kick the bucket means to die. A listener knowing only the meaning of the words “kick” and “bucket” would not be able to deduce what the expression actually means. Though the phrase can literally refer to the act of giving a kick to a bucket, the literal interpretation is a rarity when native speakers use the phrase, and students of a new language can often be frustrated by their use.
So the following features are essential to constitute an idiom:
1) Non-compositionality of meaning: The meaning of an idiomatic collocation cannot be totally derived from the composition of the meanings of the conjoined components.
2) Non-substitutability: We cannot freely substitute for a word or even a grammar form in an idiom with a related word or form.
3) Non-variability: We cannot freey modify an idiom or apply syntactic transformations.
The term idiom hence tends to refer to groups of words which are overtly confusing to those not familiar with the term itself and its cultural background. Hence the cultural aspect is a matter of crucial importance for analyzing idioms, their conceptual content, for adequate understanding the realities of life they reflect.
Idioms and Culture
Language is a wonderful thing. Its semantic sphere encodes all available knowledge about the history, culture, habits and ways of a particular nation. This information is expressed through language means, mostly wods and phrases. The latter, especially idioms, possess the highest cultral value as they are flesh of the flesh of the national culture.
Nowadays it is a recognized fact that language is closely connected with the culture of the nation and can be understood through culture in the broad meaning of the term: the collected knowledge and wisdom of the people, their values and stereotypes, peculiarities of their mentality are all reflected in the language. From this point of view, Phraseology is “a treasure-house of the language” (A.V. Kunin).
Idioms are termes which require some foundational knowledge, information, or experience, to use only within a common culture where parties must have common reference. As cultures are typically localized, idioms are more often not useful for communication outside of that local context. However, some idioms can be more universally used than others, and they can be easily translated, or their metaphorical meaning can be more easily deduced.
The most common idioms can have deep roots, traceable across many langyages. To have blood on one’s hands is a familiar example, whose meaning is obvious. Many have translations in their languages, some of which are direct. For example, get lost! (i. e. go away or stop bothering me) is said to have originated from a Yiddish expression.
Many idiomsare in fact colloquial metaphors. According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary metahors are figures of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that in which it is properly applicable. I.A. Richards quoting form Aristotle’s Poetics said that the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor and he defined it as a ahift carrying over a word from its normal use to a new one. In a sense metaphor, the shift of a word, is occasioned and justified by a similarity or analogy between the object it is usually applied to and the new object (12).
While many idioms are clearly based in conceptual metaphors such as “time as a substance”, “time as a path”, “love as war” or “up is more”, the idioms themselves are often not particuarly essential, even when the metaphors themselves are. For example “spend time”, “battle of the sexes”, and “back in the day” are idiomatic and based on essential metaphors, but one can communicate perfectly well with or without them.
In phrases like “profits are up”, the metaphor is carried by the component “up” itself. The phrase “profits are up” is not an idiom but a free collocation. Practically any word denoting somethng measurable can be used in place of the word “profits”, for example: “crime is up”, “satisfaction is up”, “complaints are up” etc. True idioms are stable word-combinations with-combination with a complicated semantics which generally involves some cultural knowledge.
Interestingly, many Chinese characters are likewise idiomatic constructs, as their meanings are more often not traceable to a lteral (ie. pctographic) meaning of their asembled parts, or radicals. Because al characters are composed from a relatively small base of ~214 radicals, their assembled meanings follow several different models of interpretation – from the pictographic to the metaphorical to those whose original meaning has been lost in history.
Idioms are cultural references can be accommodated in a broader definition of realia, i.e. lexical items designating elements specific to a partcular culture. See for exampe the folowing definition, originally by the Bulgarian scholars Vlahov and Florin, andquoted by B. Osimo in an online course on translation theory (14): (idioms) are words (and composed expressions) (…) representing denominatios of objects, concepts. Typical phenomena of a given geographic place, of material life or of social-historical peculiarities of some people, nation, country, tribe (sic), that for this reason carry a national, ocal or historical color; these words do not have exact matches in other languages.
Set against this definition, our examples appear to designate objects or concepts typical of a given cuture: traditional British culture – British cuisine- in the case of Christmas pudding, or American sci-fi in the case of quantum leap. Neither of them has “exact matches” hatever this means) in other languages. Both phrases carry some “local colour”. Even more than with single-word realia, when dealing with set phrases like the ones in out examples, language professionals are keen to search for a cultural equivalent, as it witnesses for example by the many multilingual lists of idioms circulating in interpreter-training institutions.
Culture can be defined as a “design for living’ and as the “shared understandings that people use to co-ordinate their activities”. Members of a society must share certain basic ideas about the world works, what is important in life, how technology is used, and what their artefacts and their actions mean. Whereas social structure refers to the practical/instrumental aspects of the social relation, culture refers to the symbolic/expressive aspects of social relations.