THE ROLE OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN ENHANCING THEMATIC AND IDEOLOGICAL EXPRESSION IN LITERARY TEXT (ON THE MATERIAL OF ENGLISH PROSE)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the role of phraseological units in strengthening the thematic and ideological expression of a literary text. Relying on the theory of phraseological stability developed by V.V. Vinogradov and A.V. Kunin, on the theory of foregrounding (I.V. Arnold, G. Leech, M. Short) and on the discourse-oriented approach of A. Naciscione, the study treats a phraseological unit not as a decorative element of style but as a condensed carrier of image, evaluation and cultural memory that the author places in the service of the theme and the idea of the work. On the material of English prose by C. Dickens, J. Austen, T. Hardy, J. Steinbeck and G. Orwell, five types of occasional transformation of phraseological units are identified: extension with metalinguistic commentary, contamination, allusive use in the title, parody of the proverb pattern, and structural deviation leading to new phraseologisation. It is shown that phraseological units perform five text-forming functions – thematic-nominative, evaluative-ideological, characterological, compositional-cohesive and intertextual – which are realised at three levels of the text: the micro-level of the utterance, the macro-level of the character and the episode, and the mega-level of the title and the text as a whole. The strongest thematic effect is observed when a unit occupies a strong position of the text and its image is sustained throughout the work. Special attention is paid to the preservation of these functions in English–Uzbek literary translation and to the use of the results in teaching English literature at university level.

Keywords

phraseological unit, idiom, proverb, literary text, theme, idea, occasional transformation, foregrounding, strong position of the text, sustained image, intertextuality, allusion, literary translation, English prose.