COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL REALIA IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article examines phraseological realia representing the most picturesque and expressive part of the vocabulary of the language, reflecting the customs, traditions of the people, memoirs of their history, folklore. They are characterized by double semantics and the meaning of the constituent words of these phraseological units creates a completely new image. The phraseological realia is a variational category associated with the process of mainly binary comparison of the languages at lexical and phraseological levels. Some linguists without proper grounds increase the volume of phraseological realia including idioms into this category. They, without any doubt, can be realia but an idiom as a whole unit because of a generalized and abstract character does not have a correspondence, a correlated denotatum in extralinguistic subject matter. Consequently, they cannot be referred to the realia. From the semantic view, thanks to the presence of metalanguage information about assigning to “their” speech group in their semantic continuum, realia partly coincide with dialectisms. Like dialectisms, they provide a speech with a certain colour, create language characteristics of literary characters. But, the fundamental discrepancy between dialectisms is that the geographic information of the realia is associated with a signified object. It is the information about specific objects and phenomena of a particular geographic area. Local marking of dialectisms is the information about specific linguistic means of identifying well-known objects. As we were convinced, phraseologisms have their specific phraseological meaning, which differs from its general linguistic invariant meaning, firstly, by the uniqueness of generalization of its semantic content and, secondly, by a higher degree of it. The uniqueness of the phraseological meaning of at least one component of a phraseological unit combines all its components into a single whole, beyond which it does not exist. From the translation point of view there can be distinguished explicit and hidden realia. They seem to have correspondences in the target language, but the correlated denotata in extralingustic subject matter are very different. So the spontaneous substitution of their meanings which have different artistic-stylistic colouring can lead to a number of additional difficulties associated with culturological differences.