| Abstract [eng] |
Intensive development of phraseology over the last decades has put forward a number of different problems. The contrastive examination of phraseological systems of different languages is acquiring more significance. Phraseology is the sphere of the language which selects facts in a clear way from the external world. It does not take into consideration all the aspects of a given thing or a phenomenon, but restricts itself to distinguishing only some of them. Phraseologisms are passed on from one generation to another, preserving in their consciousness a simplified picture of the world. Thus phraseological units interpret the world rather than reflect it. In the present paper, I started from a basic problem: defining the basis of comparison, i.e. tertium comparationis. The aim of the present research is to compare English and Lithuanian phraseological units with the concept ‘stone’ on different semantic levels and to explicate their differences and similarities. If we want to compare the application of phraseological units in different cultures, we need a corpus which demonstrates their use in each of these languages. The corpus citations are taken from the two largest general reference corpora available in the languages under study, namely the British National Corpus and DONELAITIS compiled by the Computational Linguistics Centre in Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University as well as from monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, phraseological dictionaries, dictionaries of proverbs and sayings. Phraseological units have no absolute equivalent correspondences in other languages. In most cases, the reason for it, however, is not grounded in their ‘cultural’ or ‘national’ specifics, but in the fact that different languages go different ways in semantic re-interpretation, i.e. in creating figurative meanings on the basis of literal ones. The words ‘stone’ in English and ‘akmuo’ in Lithuanian belong to the group of culturally connotated words. [...]. |
