INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. DEFINITIONS

The present chapter deals with word-groups consisting of two or more words whose combination is integrated as a unit with a special­ized meaning of the whole, such as not for the world, with half a heart* tips and downs, for love or money, off and on, up to the mark, ships that pass in the night, close at hand, give a green light to, red-letter day, sleep like a log, that's a horse of another colour, can the leopard change his spots? it goes without saying, and so on. Stability of such word-groups viewed in terms of statistical probability of co-occurrence for the mem­ber words has been offered as a reliable criterion helping to distinguish set expressions from free phrases with variable context.

The chapter has received its heading because of the great ambigu­ity of the terms phraseology and idioms which are also widely accepted. Opinions differ as to how this part of the vocabulary should be defined, classified, described and analysed. To make matters worse no two authors agree upon the terminology they use. The word "phraseology", for instance, has ver\ different meanings in this coun­try and in Great Britain or the United States. In Soviet linguistic liter­ature the term has come to be used for the whole ensemble of expres­sions where the meaning of one element is dependent on the other, ir­respective of the structure and properties of the unit (V.V. Vinogradov); with other authors it denotes only such set expressions which, as distin­guished from idioms, do not possess expressiveness or emotional col­ouring (A.I. Smirnitsky), and also vice versa: only those that are imag­inative, expressive and emotional (the author of the present book in a previous work). N.N. Amosova overcomes the subjectiveness of the two last mentioned approaches when she insists on the term being ap­plicable only to what she calls fixed context units, i.e. units in which it is impossible to substitute any of the components without changing the meaning not only of the whole unit but also of the elements that remain intact. O.S. Ahmanova has repeatedly insisted on the semantic integrity of such phrases prevailing over the structural separateness of their elements. A.V. Koonin lays stress on the structural sepa­rateness of the elements in a phraseological unit, on the change of mean­ing in the whole as compared with its elements taken separately and on a certain minimum stability.

All these authors use the same word "phraseology" to denote the branch of linguistics studying the word-groups they have in mind.

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Continued intelligent devotion to the problems of phraseology of such scholars as N.N. Amosova, A.V. Koonin and many many others has turned phraseology into a full-fledged linguistic discipline; we in­clude it into this course of lexicology only because so far this is where it belongs according to the curriculum.¹

In English and American linguistics the situation is very different. No special branch of study exists, and the term "phraseology" is a styl­istic one meaning, according to Webster's dictionary, 'mode of expres­sion, peculiarities of diction, i.e. choice and arrangement of words and phrases characteristic of some author or some literary work*.

The word "idiom" is even more polysemantic. The English use it to denote a mode of expression peculiar to a language, without differ­entiating between the grammatical and lexical levels. It may also mean a group of words whose meaning it is difficult or impossible to under­stand from the knowledge of the words considered separately. Moreover, "idiom" may be synonymous to the words "language" or "dialect", de­noting a form of expression peculiar to a people, a country, a district, or to one individual. There seems to be no point in enumerating further possibilities. The word "phrase" is no less polysemantic.

The term set expression is on the contrary more definite and self-explanatory, because the first element points out the most im­portant characteristic of these units, namely, their stability, their fixed and ready-made nature. The word "expression" suits our purpose, because it is a general term including words, groups of words and sen­tences, so that both ups and downs and that's a horse of another colour are expressions. That is why in the present chapter we shall use this term in preference to all the others.

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