Dimorphism of phrazeological units (on the materials of east-Slavic medieval historiography)

Abstract

The analysis of written references of historiographic genre, which proved wide dimorphism of phrazeological units in east-Slavic languages that preserved strong Kyiv-Rus tradition in chronicles in 16^th – 18^th centuries, was made.  Stated phrazeological units made it possible to classify five variant types: lexical, grammatical, quantitative, positional and mixed. A great number of lexical and grammatical variants are associated with system relationship between lexical units and specificity of grammar structures of east-Slavic languages, in particular their synthetic nature, which helps vary phrazeological units. Lexical variants are presented with the substitution of a verb, noun, adjective and adverb component. Grammatical dimorphism is determined with the use of singular and plural of a substantive component, the use of a substantive component with parallel case endings, the use of forms with prepositions and without them, the use of a full and short form of adjectives, the use of various forms of degrees of comparison of adjectives, the use of prefixal/suffixal variants of a substantive component, the use of verbs of perfective and imperfective aspect. The studied references demonstrate the evolution of a grammatical structure of east-Slavic languages which helped single out diachronic-grammatical variants, in which their components represent different chronological stages of the formation of various grammatical forms. Closer to modern times, one can see less dimorphism of a lexical component, petrifaction of case, number forms of nouns or personal verb forms, fixation of a word order. The research done enables to state that phrazeological dimorphism, as a lingual phenomenon, has a general language nature. Phrazeological dimorphism itself is one of the proofs of dynamic processes in a language in general.