Phraseological units, or idioms represent what can probably be described as the most picturesque, colourful and expressive part of the languages vocabulary.
Metaphors. The ambiguousness of these interesting word groups may lead to an amusing misunderstanding, especially for children. Puns are frequently based on the ambiguousness of idioms. Together with synonymy and antonymy, phraseology represents expressive resources of vocabulary. Used with care is an important warning because speech overloaded with idioms loses its freshness and originality. Idioms, after all, are ready-made speech units, and their continual repetition sometimes wears them out: they lose their colours and become trite cliches. Such idioms can hardly be said to ornament or enrich the language. Oral or written speech lacking idioms loses much in expressiveness, colour and emotional force. There are some other terms denoting more or less the same linguistic phenomenon: set-expressions, set-phrases, phrases, fixed word-groups, collocations. The confusion in the terminology reflects insufficiency of positive or wholly reliable criteria by which phraseological units can be distinguished from free word-groups.
Free word-groups are so called not because of any absolute freedom in using them but simply because they are each time built up anew in the speech process whereas idioms are used as ready-made units with fixed and constant structures. The task of distinguishing between free word-groups and phraseological units is further complicated by the existence of a great number of marginal cases, the so-called semi-fixed or semi-free word-groups, also called non-phraseological word-groups which share with phraseological units their structural stability but lack their semantic unity and figurativeness e. g. to go to school, to go by bus, to commit suicide.
There are two major criteria for distinguishing between phraseological units and free word-groups: semantic and structural.
The semantic shift affecting phraseological units does not consist in a mere change of meanings of each separate constituent part of the unit. The meanings of the constituents merge to produce an entirely new meaning: e. g. to have a bee in ones bonnet means to have an obsession about something; to be eccentric or even a little mad. The humorous metaphoric comparison with a person who is distracted by a bee continually buzzing under his cap has become erased and half-forgotten, and the speakers using the expression hardly think of bees or bonnets but accept it in its transferred sense: obsessed, eccentric. In the traditional approach, phraseological units have been defined as word-groups conveying a single concept whereas in free word-groups each meaningful component stands for a separate concept.
The structural criterion brings forth pronounced distinctive features characterising phraseological units and contrasting them to free word-groups. Structural invariability is an essential feature of phraseological units, though, as we shall see, some of them possess it to a lesser degree than others.
Structural invariability of phraseological units finds expression in a number of restrictions:
1 restriction in substitution. As a rule, no word can be substituted for any meaningful component of a phraseological unit without destroying its sense.
2 The second type of restriction is the restriction in introducing any additional components into the structure of a phraseological unit. In a free word-group such changes can be made without affecting the general meaning of the utterance.
3 The third type of structural restrictions in phraseological units is grammatical invariability. Yet again, as in the case of restriction in introducing additional components, there are exceptions to the rule and these are probably even more numerous. One can build a castle in the air, but also castles.
--
Classification
Taking into account mainly the degree of idiomaticity phraseological units may be classified into three big groups: phraseological fusions, phraseological unities and phraseological collocations.2
Phraseological fusions are completely non-motivated word-groups, such as red tape — ‘bureaucratic methods’; heavy father — ’serious or solemn part in a theatrical play’; kick the bucket — ‘die’; and the like. The meaning of the components has no connections whatsoever, at least synchronically, with the meaning of the whole group. Idiomaticity is, as a rule, combined with complete stability of the lexical components and the grammatical structure of the fusion.
Phraseological unities are partially non-motivated as their meaning can usually be perceived through the metaphoric meaning of the whole phraseological unit. For example, to show one’s teeth, to wash one’s dirty linen in public if interpreted as semantically motivated through the combined lexical meaning of the component words would naturally lead one to understand these in their literal meaning. The metaphoric meaning of the whole unit, however, readily suggests ‘take a threatening tone’ or ’show an intention to injure’ for show one’s teeth and ‘discuss or make public one’s quarrels’ for wash one’s dirty linen in public. Phraseological unities are as a rule marked by a comparatively high degree of stability of the lexical components.
Phraseological collocations are motivated but they are made up of words possessing specific lexical valency which accounts for a certain degree of stability in such word-groups. In phraseological collocations variability of member-words is strictly limited. For instance, bear a grudge may be changed into bear malice, but not into bear a fancy or liking. We can say take a liking (fancy) but not take hatred (disgust). These habitual collocations tend to become kind of clichés1 where the meaning of member-words is to some extent dominated by the meaning of the whole group. Due to this phraseological collocations are felt as possessing a certain degree of semantic inseparability.
