CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF SEMANTICS OF ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS OF PHRASEOTHEMATIC GROUP “LOCATION”

Abstract

The article deals with the contrastive analysis of the semantics of English and Ukrainian phraseological units of the phraseothematic group “Location”. The purpose of the paper is to specify their semantic peculiarities as well as the extra-linguistic factors that caused them. Due to the fact that phraseological units can verbalize different types of location of the object in space, we distinguished three phraseosemantic fields within the phraseothematic group “Location”: “Projective location”, “Topological location” and “Deictic location”. Phraseosemantic field “Projective location” is quantitatively dominant in both languages and it falls into two phraseosemantic groups: “Distance” and “Location utilizing frames of references”. Phraseosemantic field “Topological Location” also consists of two phraseosemantic groups: “Location at locus” and “Location at topos”. The contrastive analysis of the semantics of English and Ukrainian phraseological units within each of the phraseosemantic groups revealed some isomorphic features. It was found out that the concept of distance is the most verbalized in both languages. Besides, the semantics of the phraseological units describing the location of the object at a short distance is related to interpersonal relations. Specific for English phraseological system, as compared to Ukrainian one, is the verbalization of the location of the object utilizing the absolute frame of references, connection of the location of the object with professional activities and a social status. During the study it was determined that Ukrainian phraseological units tend to verbalize long distance in horizontal dimension 360 degrees around a reference point and they demonstrate association of remoteness with danger. Extra-linguistic factors that had impact on the formation of the found peculiarities are the geographic conditions of living of the ethnic groups, their historical destiny and etiquette rules. The obtained results provide resources to develop lexical exercises for the cadets of the military educational institutions for developing linguistic and cultural competence in the process of learning English as a foreign language.