ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS OF LATIN AND FRENCH ORIGIN: COMPONENT “WILDLIFE”

Abstract

Borrowings enrich the English language during the whole history of its development and the extent of borrowings in the lexico-graphic stock of the language is rather big. In its turn, the English phraseological stock is characterised by the great number of Romance elements due to the certain historical conditions of the development of Great Britain. But despite the fact that phraseological units are highly informative units which keep the knowledge and experience of different nations, the problem of the borrowed phraseological units remains an unstudied sphere within the cognitive linguistics. As the problem of the phraseological borrowing has not been examined properly in the linguistic literature, the article deals with English phraseological units of Latin and French origin with component “wildlife”. The authors have singled out English phraseological units with wildlife components. Then the etymological investigation of the borrowed phraseological units has been conducted. Also an attempt has been made to analyze the inner form of the wildlife component in English phraseological units of Latin and French origin. It has been noticed that they contain the human knowledge of the world and the role of people in it. Besides, the similarity of the images and associations, connected with the investigated wildlife component, is caused by rather identical cognition of the world around – the world of nature.