COLLOCATIONS WITH THE “DESPAIR” COMPONENT IN ENGLISH, GERMAN AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES AND SOME PECULIARITIES OF THEIR TRANSLATION

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the research of collocations that include a lexical item with semantics of ‘despair’ in English, German and Ukrainian, as well as highlights some peculiarities of their translation through the prism of analysis of the internal form of collocations elements. The research was carried out by using structural-functional and distributive analysis with elements of a cognitive approach. The research material was selected by using continuous sampling method from the national linguistic corpora of Ukrainian, English and German, i.e. General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian, British National Corpus, Mannheimer Korpus für Deutsche Sprache, respectively. The paper considers both the established, codified collocations recorded in lexicographic sources, and typical combinations of words based on their frequency in the above-mentioned linguistic corpora. The term “colocation” is presented inUkrainian linguistics relatively recently and, therefore, it has not been established yet and is interpreted in a wide sense. This paper provides its clarified definition and criteria for distinguishing it from such related terms as “idiom” and “phraseological unit”. Collocations are in the transition zone between lexis and phraseology because they do not have a clear metaphorization. Based on the available classifications of collocations on various features, collocations with the “despair” component are classified in English, German and Ukrainian according to their lexical composition, indicating the peculiarities of their translation depending on the group to which the collocation belongs. Since the lexical meaning of a word can be influenced by both the context and syntagmatic partners of a word, vocabulary units can acquire new meanings or shades of meaning in speech. Therefore, linguistic corpora offer a fruitful material for analysis, because they help to identify in which way and how often words are combined. As a result of the research, it has been found out that even some frequent collocations are linguospecific, which can create problems for their translation. This allows identifying differences in the perception of the world by native speakers of a particular language. Moreover, it enables establishing the relationship between language and thinking, which constitute relevant issues within the anthropometric approach to the analysis of linguistic phenomena.