PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH A HEAD WORD ‘KRAST’ IN BULGARIAN AND RUSSIAN

Abstract

The concept of ‘cross’ is polysemantic. It is one of the three fundamental world emblems, a sacred Christian symbol in the religious, cultural-historical and linguistic continuum of the Slavic peoples. Therefore, it motivates the emergence of many various stable word combinations. The article discusses mostly real (full) phrasemеs and partly nonreal (non-full) phraseological units with component ‘cross’ (which forms 17 microsemantic cores with the first lexeme ‘a symbol of Christianity; a written mark, formed by two lines going across each other’ and 7 microsemantic cores with the Bulgarian homonym ‘krаst’ meaning lower back ‘the lower part of the back’), excerpted from Bulgarian and Russian phraseological dictionaries and media texts. A comparison is made between the phrases in both languages, highlighting the common Slavic uses and differences, the specific expressions (direct, metaphorical and metonymic use of ‘cross’), which are the linguistic picture of each ethnic phenotype. Phraseologisms are analyzed and categorized on several grounds: degree of desemantization of the constituent components – phraseological combinations, phraseological units, phraseological adhesions (fusions); grammatical structure (mono-element: only S; bi-element: only V + S, A + S, A + Adv; three-element: V+ A+ S, V + S + Pron, S + pr + S, S+ Adv + S , S + pr + Pron; poly-element: V+ S+ pr+ Pron, V+ Pron+ pr+ S, pr+ Pron+ V+ S, etc.).