Modern Greek Phraseological Units Containing Zoonym As Compound Nominal Predicate

Abstract

The processes that take place in the mind of native speakers during the communication, have often been an object of various contemporary linguistic studies based on the anthropocentric approach to the linguistic picture of the world. The processes of semantic change and transformation are of peculiar interest. This article analyses the Modern Greek zoonyms functioning as components of predicative phraseological units (idioms) in the sentences with a compound nominal predicate. The material features 359 idioms with syntactic formula Cop_fΧ, where Cop_f is the auxiliary verb ( είμαι ‘to be’, φαίνομαι ‘to appear’, παρουσιάζομαι ‘to be perceived as’, γίνομαι ‘to become’, etc.), and Χ is nominal predicate. The analysis aims to provide their structural characterization and to describe their role in communication. For each of them quantitative, qualifying, and axiological characteristics are also presented. The zoonyms developed metaphorical meaning in Ancient Greek, so it inevitably affects their idiomatic use in Modern Greek. The paper reveals the main functions of zoonyms in the cultural code of the Greek linguistic picture of the world, analyses the structure of sentences with a zoonym component, and also provides a hierarchy of positive, negative and neutral connotations of zoonyms in the Greek linguistic picture of the world.

Keywords: Idiom as predicativeModern Greek phraseologyzoomorphic metaphorzoomorphismzoonyms

Introduction

Realizing himself as a part of living nature, a man, nevertheless, is inclined to distinguish himself from other living beings, many of which for centuries and even millennia have been his faithful companions. Of course, animals occupy a special position among them, since “the animal world and the relations ... of its representatives traditionally served a person as a model that could act ... as a visual model of the life of human society” (Litvinova, 2015, p. 177). Zoomorphism, i.e., the property of human thinking to transfer the qualities of an animal to a person, leads to the formation in the consciousness of the latter of relatively stable connections (connotations) between the name of the animal and the characteristics that it possesses, which as a result leads to the formation of metaphors - tokens regularly used in figurative meaning and in this sense possessing a “ready-made” imagery (Sklyarevskaya, 1993, p. 12) (such, for example, a swine token that characterizes a person as unclean and unworthy (Сf. the use of the lexeme in examples Ты посмотри, что в комнате у тебя творится, свинья ты такая! [Alexey Slapovsky. Life of Lagarpov (1999)]; «Ай да Хрипушин! Ай да свинья! Нашёл что придумать!» ― подумала она с омерзением и уважением.) [Yu. O. Dombrovsky. Faculty of unnecessary things, part 5 (1978)]. Examples are borrowed from the National Corpus of the Russian Language (http://ruscorpora.ru, accessed 02/27/2019). ) ). Metaphors with a zoononym component that transfer the properties or signs of animals to humans are among the most commonly used in different languages, and their main feature is qualificativity, due to which a series of models are formed that describe either social types and standards of appearance, or behavior and internal qualities of a man (Arkhangelskaya, 2006).

Problem Statement

The set of zoomorphic metaphors of each language “is unique for each particular society, since in different languages figurative meanings ... have different lexical units” (Shumilina, 2014, p. 241). This means that the study and interpretation of such metaphors can be considered as a means of studying the linguistic picture of the world (LPW) of a particular language (Gavrilyuk, 2012).

Already in late antiquity, various paremiographs such as Zenobius, Diogenian, Plutarch, and in Byzantine times, Gregory of Cyprus and Mikhail Apostolius compiled lists of paremias that contain a sufficient number of stable expressions with zoonymic components (cf., for example, analysis of the zoononym βοῦς in (Zabudskaya & Tresorukova, 2019). Studies of this kind are very few on modern Greek material and consider a limited number of zoonyms (Kamilaki et al., 2016), while the authors continue the ancient Greek tradition of “cataloging” such phenomena, practically without grammatical, syntactic and semasiological analysis of data of phraseological units.

This article attempts to analyze the predicative phraseological units of the Greek language comprehensively, in which both their semantic and syntactic features are taken into account.

Research Questions

A detailed semantic analysis of modern Greek predicative phraseological units with a zoonym component is given below. From the point of view of syntax, in most cases their structure preserves the syntactic model of a free phrase (cf. Russian sly fox, Greek πονηρή αλεπού) and less often represents a sentence. Many researchers (e.g., F.F. Fortunatov, E.D. Polivanov, N.M. Shansky, V.L. Arkhangelsky, etc.) divide the phraseological units into non-predicative and predicative ones. In terms of predicative phraseological units, the following are distinguished: a) partially predicative phraseological units in which the first, grammatically leading member has an addition (direct, indirect, circumstantial) or definition in the form of a subordinate clause; and b) predicative phraseological units, which, in turn, are divided into predicative phraseological units with a closed structure, expressing a finished thought and syntactically designed as simple or complex sentences, and predicative phraseological units with an open structure, expressing an unfinished thought and requiring spreading in speech with variable words (as cited in Nazaryan, 1987).

Compound nominal predicate in classical school theory means a predicate consisting of “auxiliary part (connective) and nominal (main, semantic) part” of the type Ivan – teacher (Bagryantseva et al., 2011). The same definition is accepted in the Greek syntactic tradition, where this type of predicate also consists of a linking verb (συνδετικό ρήμα) and a nominal part (κατηγορούμενο) (Tompaidis, 2004), compare, for example, Ο Αριστείδης 'έγινε στρατιώτης . Such a formal approach allows us to understand the structure of the phraseological units considered in the article, but this is not enough for a full analysis of their communicative properties.

For complex syntactic and semantic analysis, it is worthwhile to turn to works on functional-communicative grammar (Zolotova et al., 2004), where the basic principle is the analysis of “the correlation of form and its expressed content” (Ibid.). Such an approach, not used on modern Greek material up to now, will allow us to comprehensively analyze predicative phraseological units at the syntactic and semantic levels of a sentence, namely, to isolate sentence models with certain typical values (that is, “generalized semantic results of predicative conjugation of subject and predicative components” (Ibid.)). It is worth noting that “the conjugation of a predicative attribute with the subject - its carrier, expressing in the language categories of modality, time and person the relevance of the sentence to reality” is understood as predicativity in functional-communicative grammar (Zolotova et al., 2004).

A compound nominal predicate is one way of expressing a predicative component in a sentence. Phraseological units including this type of predicate, the syntactic formula of which can be represented as CopfΧ, where Copf is an auxiliary verb ( είμαι ‘to be’, φαίνομαι ‘to appear’ , παρουσιάζομαι ‘to be perceived as’, γίνομαι ‘to become’, etc.), and Χ - the name predicate, belong to the class of substantive sentences that have a typical value - assignment to the class of objects (qualifying attribute) (Zolotova et al., 2004). This model as invariants can also contain phase, i.e., incomplete verbs (Ibid.), which are modifications of the substantive model with the verb γίνομαι 'become' (compare. e.g. γίνομαι βδέλλα literally 'become a leech' i.e. 'become intrusive', γίνομαι παπί 'become a duckling', i.e. 'get wet to the skin').

Purpose of the Study

This article attempts to consider predicative phraseological units with the closed structure of a simple sentence containing a zoononym component as part of a nominal predicate. It analyzes not only the semantics of the corresponding phraseological units, but also their communicative properties. It is assumed that the obtained material will allow not only to single out the frequence phraseological units for the Greek language and to characterize them from the semantic, syntactic and communicative point of view, but also to draw conclusions about what “symbolic load” the zoonyms included in them have in modern Greek LPW.

Research Methods

As a result of the analysis of the corpus of texts of the modern Greek language ΕΘΕΓ (http://hnc.ilsp.gr/) , elTenTen2014 (https://www.sketchengine.eu/eltenten-greek-corpus/) , ΣΕΚ (http://www.sek.edu.gr/) by the continuous sampling method, we have selected 359 predicative phraseological units with a zoonym component. Of these, 73 phraseological units are considered in this paper, containing a compound nominal predicate expressed by a combination of the verbs είμαι ‘be’ and γίνομαι ‘become’ with a nominal predicate. Such a limitation of material is due, firstly, to the requirements for the volume of work, and secondly, that it is idiomatic combinations of this kind that are unambiguously interpreted as phraseological units, as evidenced by the corresponding dictionary mark in the explanatory dictionaries of the Greek language (Kharalampakis, 2014; LKN: Leksiko tis kinis neoellinikis glossas. Idrima Manoli Triantafillidi, 2015; Katos: Katos, G. V. Leksiko tis laikis kai tis perithoriakis mas glossas, 2016).

As a quantitative analysis of the use of phraseological units of this type in text bodies, in Google, Yandex search engines, and on Twitter and Telegram channels showed namely this model of phraseological units is most often used in the Greek language after language metaphors (LM), which are usually separate lexemes as part of free sentences.

Findings

Zoonyms, like the whole evaluative vocabulary of any language, contribute to the expression of feelings, reactions, emotional life of a person as a whole, forming and denoting a valuable picture of the world: assessment of objects according to the ethical and aesthetic standards of a given language collective (good - bad, beautiful - ugly, etc.). The predicative-characterizing semantic variant includes the nominative as the basis, to which the value (seme) of the characteristic is added, which complicates the structure of the variant and makes a qualitative change to it (Zabudskaya & Tresorukova, 2019). At the same time, the linguistic specificity of this meaning is manifested in the fact that the content of the characteristic is caused not so much by the qualities of a real non-linguistic object (in this case, an animal), but by qualities that are attributed to this object by a collective linguistic consciousness. The language registers, fixes these qualities as inherent in the denotatum (the object, as it is reflected in the language), which allows to regularly use the name of the object as a standard of certain qualities (Litvin, 1984).

The emergence of anthropocentric incremental meanings in zoonyms, the inclusion of zoonyms in the phraseology indicate a linguistic personality's subjective recognition of the importance of animals in the general interpretative picture of the world, which is determined by the traditional model of transfer of animal qualities to humans and vice versa. Animals are by nature closer to humans and more drawn into the world of their transformations, more connected with the historical development of civilization (compare, for example, cult images of animals in various religions, zoomorphism of mythology, etc.). In other words, animalism always remains that sense-forming background on which linguistic and cult stereotypes are formed (Maslova, 1997).

The imagery of zoononymous comparisons and metaphors, the selection of relevant features that create the image, and orientation toward the addressee - taking into account his ability to understand comparison and metaphor not only intellectually, but also, evaluating the signified and the image that underlie them, emotionally perceive this image and correlate it with a scale of emotionally positive or negative reactions determined by national-cultural concepts make them conventional (Ibid.).

As mentioned above, the main feature of phraseological units with a component-zoononym is qualification (Arkhangelskaya, 2006), which is why the following set of models will be used to analyze the collected material, giving an idea of the subjective perception of the animal world through the prism of human consciousness: character traits or emotional state; social behavior; appearance or physical condition; social type of person.

Conclusion

As shown above, most of the phraseological units with a component-zoononym in the LPW of a Greek speaker transmit negative characteristics of a person, which, of course, is associated with their cult and mythological “load” and determines their ethnically peculiar interpretation. So, for example, in all groups in the phraseological unit with zoonony components, there are γάιδαρος ‘donkey’, γίδα ‘goat’, σκύλος ‘wolf’, αλεπού ‘fox’ and a little less often λύκος ‘wolf’, which are present in the Greek LPW from ancient times, at the same time, semes with a negative value are already found in ancient and medieval texts (compare, for example, Aesop's fables, as well as (Eideneier, 2016).

From the structural point of view, most phraseological units with a zoononym component formed according to the Cop_fΧ scheme have auxiliary verbs είμαι ‘to be’ (in 80% of phraseological units describing a person’s appearance, 70% phraseological units characterizing behavior), while the verb γίνομαι ‘become’ is used in 18% of cases. As shown above, the verb be and its variants as part of a compound nominal predicate attribute a qualifying pattern to the subject of the sentence, while the verb becomes phase, i.e. indicates a change in state. It should be concluded that the analyzed phraseological units of the indicated categories ascribe a certain permanent sign to a person more often, than indicate his change. The opposite situation, however, is observed in the category of phraseological units describing the character of a person, where the verb γίνομαι ‘becomes’ more frequent (60%).

Summing up, it should be noted that phraseological units with a component-zoonym clearly demonstrate what place animals occupy in the LPW of a Greek speaker. Practically each of the animals is assigned one or another stable quality, which is expressed in attributing the corresponding seme in the composition of the phraseological unit to the person. At the same time, the analysis showed that the meaning of the phraseological unit is formed not only due to the connotative sem of the zoononym included in it, but is also largely determined by the linking verb (compare, for example, the difference in the meanings of the phraseological units είμαι σκυλί literally ‘be a dog’ and γίνομαι σκυλί literally ‘become a dog’, discussed above) and definitions of various types. During the analysis, it was also found that there are cases of homonymy of phraseological units, which is an interesting question for further study.

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