PHRASELOGICAL UNITS WITH THE CONCEPT-WORD “HORSE” AS A MEANS OF VERBAL EXPRESSION OF MOVEMENT IN SPACE

Abstract

In the phraseological systems of almost all Indo-European languages, the associations related to the image and symbol of the horse are quite stable and do not vary significantly in different languages. This follows from the similar conditions of development of the respective countries and, therefore, a similar perception of the horse in the minds of native speakers. The majority of such expressions have vivid imagery, and therefore play an important role in creating phraseological units (idioms). It should be born in mind that the word «horse» has acquired a symbolic meaning since ancient times, because then it had an exceptional importance in people’s lives as an irreplaceable multifunctional assistant, unlike other animals that could replace it only in certain situations. In addition, due to its external (beauty, grace) and internal (endurance, speed, strength) characteristics, the horse was used by representatives of various social strata, which contributed to its symbolization. Since symbolic meaning can be acquired only in a stable context, the word “horse” becomes a constituent concept of a large number of phrases in different languages, and as a result, they evolved into phrases or expressions that later acquired an idiomatic nature. In phraseology, where the lexical meaning of each word does not matter, we perceive the entire expression as an indivisible whole where one or another component word motivates the meaning of the unit in general. Taking this into account, in the current study we have singled out from the corpus of the Ukrainian phraseology all units with the word «horse» and made an attempt to typologise them (by thematic groups, linguistic affiliation of the word root, and semantics). Special attention was paid to the understanding of a horse as an almost irreplaceable means of movement in space, due to which phraseological units with the corresponding concept can be considered a verbal means of expressing movement in space in the linguistic picture of the world of a Ukrainian person.