COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SEMANTIC FIELDS PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH THE “HEAD” COMPONENT IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN

Abstract

The article provides a comparative analysis of the semantic fields of phraseological units with the “head” component in English and Russian. The analysis has established that in the languages under consideration there are both correspondences to the sphere and differences. Most of the studied phraseological units of the both languages belong to the semantic macrofield “Man”, which combines the semantic fields “Human life”, “Human actions”, “Psycho-emotional state of a person”, “Interactions between people”, which are the most common in the both languages. The contextual meaning of the somatic phraseological units of these languages is characterized by a noticeable ratio of phraseological formulas observed in a widely branched plexus of microfields. In most cases, they are common to the two languages. There are a number of microfields of both languages, formed by the somatic phraseological units, which are characterized by contrasting semantics. The semantics of many somatic phraseological units is determined by the lexico-semantic capabilities of the core somatic element. The analysis established an obvious connection between the structure and semantics of the considered units of these languages. There are quite a lot of similarities in the general semantic analysis of somatic phraseological units of the languages under consideration. Significant discrepancies are also noted in the main manifestations of the figurative structure of the dominant number of units under consideration, due to the peculiar use of lexical and semantic capabilities of the somatic component, characteristic of each of these languages.