Functional-stylistic Peculiarities of Usage of Idioms in Contemporary English and Ukrainian Languages.

Abstract

The article dwells upon functional-stylistic component of meaning in idioms’ semantics. The topicality of the article is stipulated by insufficient attention of the scientists to the components of the meaning of the phraseological units in the contemporary English and Ukrainian languages, in particular to their functional-stylistic peculiarities. The aim of the article is to define and describe the functional-stylistic features of idioms in the contemporary English and Ukrainian languages. The research rests on the following research methods: a continuous sampling method, opposition method, methods of analysis and synthesis, as well as a descriptive method. The connotative meaning has always been in the focus of linguistic studies. It expresses some additional meaning which can have emotive, expressive, cultural, symbolic and functional-stylistic components. It is rather difficult to single out just one component of the meaning as they are interconnected. In contemporary English, the authors of fine art widely use phraseological units to provide the reader with a large amount of information with the help of lexical units of rather small volume that have additional components of meaning. The speaker chooses a particular lexical unit due to the communicative situation, the addressee and his or her level of language knowledge. The aim of the utterance also defines the preferences of lexical units usage. If the speaker asks the addressee to do something, he or she is in the subordinate position and it determines his or her choice of words. Consequently, the functionalstylistic component of meaning is a connotative meaning, that allows to determine the social status of the speakers, their relations, the communicative situation and the level of knowledge of the language of communicants. This study does not fully reveal the peculiarities of the stylistic synonyms functioning, which gives prospects for further research.