Sources of Phraseological Units

Phraseological units based on real events:

-everyday life, e.g. to be packed like sardines; to play cat and mouse; to be wet behind the ears; to go to bed with the chickens;

professional jargon, e.g. to be in deep waters, to be in the same boat with sb (nautical sphere); to nip sth in the bud (agriculture and gardening); to keep one’s finger on the pulse (medical sphere); fair play (sports); to come up against a brick wall (building); flavour of the month (cooking) etc.;

-historic references: to throw someone to the lions (Roman entertainment of putting people in the arena with wild animals); Baker’s dozen (to guard against miscounting, bakers habitually gave thirteen loaves when selling a dozen), red tape (legal documents were bound with a red tape), white elephant (a precious gift given by a Thai King to a sub-king to ruin the latter) etc.

Phraseological units based on folklore and literary sources:

-national folklore, e.g. to rain cats and dogs, to have nine lives etc.; proverbs, e.g. the last straw, to catch at a straw etc.;

-antique myths and legends, e.g. a swan song (Ancient Greece); the Trojan horse (Rome); crocodile tears (Egypt); the lion’s share, a dog in the manger (Aesop’s fables) etc.;

-the Bible, e.g. an eye for an eye; a wolf in sheep’s clothing etc.;

-literature, e.g. to be as busy as a bee (G. Chaucer); to fight the windmills (M. de Cervantes); an albatross around one’s neck (S. T. Coleridge); something is rotten in the state of Denmark (W. Shakespeare); to grin like a Cheshire cat (L. Carroll) etc.;

-film production, e.g. Elementary, my dear Watson! home alone.

39. Dialectology as a branch of linguistics, its aim and basic notions. A dialect vs a variant.

Dialectology is a linguistic subdiscipline concerned with dialects. Its origin — apart from a few early glossaries and dialect dictionaries — can be traced back to the early 19th c. historical and comparative linguistics.

In 1876 Georg Wenkersent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These postal questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German, which were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. Many studies proceeded from this, and over the next century dialect studies were carried out all over the world.

During the Romantic era the ‘dialects of the common people,’ which were up to then held in low esteem, were elevated to the position of ‘more original’ linguistic forms; the comparative method was used to reconstruct the earlier stages of a language from its dialects.

In the investigation of general historical linguistic principles by the Neogrammarians, the dialects were even seen as being superior to the written language, since it was here that ‘consistencies in sound formation’ were genuinely apparent.

Commonly studied concepts in dialectology include:

-the problem of mutual intelligibility in defining languages and dialects;

-situations of diglossia, where two dialects are used for different functions;

-ialect continuum, i.e. a network of dialects in which geographically adjacent dialects are mutually comprehensible, but with comprehensibility steadily decreasing as distance between the dialects increases, e.g. Dutch-German dialect continuum, a vast network of dialects with two recognized literary standards;

-pluricentrism, where what is essentially a single genetic language exists as two or more standard varieties.

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