Fraseological units of colour of the Chinese language characterising people's events

Author(s):  Niu Yufeng, Belgorod National Research University, Belgorod, Russia, dujiuyijian@icloud.com

Issue:  Volume 37, № 4

Rubric:  Linguistics

Annotation:  The article is devoted to the description of functional features of phraseological units, nominating characteristics of people’s behaviour and life situations. The main criterion for describing phraseological units in this article is the principle of dividing into groups in accordance with associativity with animate and inanimate objects. In addition, the focus is concentrated on phraseological units with the main component "colour". The sign of animation in this article is relevant to a person mostly. Accordingly, we define those that describe the professional belonging of a person, activities, events in his life, appearance, emotional state as narrowly specialized groups of phraseological units. Human activity is associated with the description of the procedural nature of this activity, which explains the need to consider this processuality in the study of phraseological units that characterize events in a person's life and activities. Among the phraseological units of the Chinese language in the group under consideration, there are basically stable expressions of lacunar semantics. This means that the understanding of phraseology, its translation and the adequate transfer of its meaning by the means of another language is impossible without the knowledge of the background and the history of origin. This feature of the most part of the Chinese phraseology dictates the need to choose the component and etymological types of analysis. Component analysis will extract the colour element and, through extralinguistic data, establish the connotation of a stable expression. Etymological information will provide an opportunity to determine the content and meaning of sustainable expression. Thus, the colour component and the etymological component in the comparative aspect with the modern semantics of stable expressions justify the correlation of their connotation and context.

Keywords:  phraseological units, the Chinese language, component colour, semantics, person

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