EXPLICATION OF THE PART OF THE PHRASEOLOGICALLY BOUND MEANING OF THE IDIOM SPILL THE BEANS AS A MECHANISM OF FORMATION OF ITS PHRASEOLOGICAL VARIANT SPILL THE TEA

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the derivational relations between the phraseological units SPILL THE BEANS and SPILL THE TEA. Based on the etymological analysis, description of extralinguistic prototypes of the specified phraseological units, study of the phraseological meaning of the idiom SPILL THE BEANS, as well as the use of materials from the historical corpus of the English language COHA, the macrocorpus NOW, the author aims to trace the features of the functioning of the phraseological units in question in the contexts of the 20th and 21st centuries and comes to the conclusion about the higher frequency of the first of the specified units, the absence of phraseologically related use of the variable combination of words SPILL THE TEA until 2020, and also attempts to prove that the nominative component TEA is an explicator of the phraseologically related meaning of the component BEANS and the phraseological unit SPILL THE TEA is derived from the phraseological unit SPILL THE BEANS.