ON THE ISSUE OF MATCHING A PHRASEOLOGICAL UNIT WITH A WORD (COMPARATIVE PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS VERSUS ADJECTIVES)

Abstract:

The authors of the article consider adjectival comparative phraseological units (ACPhU) and the corresponding compound adjectives. The purpose of the article is to provide analysis of the structural, syntactic, and the semantic features of ACPhU and compound adjectives and their combinability. The study shows that there are discrepancies among these linguistic phenomena at the structural, syntactic and the semantic levels. Compound adjectives are characterized by structural uniformity; they differ in the order of their components. Both the first and the second components of the compound adjectives have a higher valency than the corresponding ACPhU components. The latter allow intrusion of separate words between the components, i.e. they are structurally separable units, whereas the wholeness of the compound adjectives does not allow morphological-grammar changes of the components. It is demonstrated in the article that ACPhU are firstly combined with nouns and pronouns characterizing a person in general, whereas compound adjectives are combined with nouns characterizing a person’s parts of the body and everything else related to him, what that person demonstrates an attitude to.

ACPhU allow wedging of some words between the components, i.e. they are structurally separable formations. The first component of ACPhU may be used in a comparative degree, the second component – in a plural form. Compound adjectives are inseparable formations, that is they do not allow wedging of any elements between the components, they are characterized by hyphenated spelling, and sometimes – inseparable or separable spelling. So, when studying ACPhU and compound adjectives, it is more reasonable to speak about their correlation rather than equivalence.