STUDYING VERTICAL CONTEXT WHEN WORKING WITH IDIOMS WITH A CULTURAL COMPONENT

Abstract. Modern linguistic doctrines are characterized by an in- depth study of the cultural aspect of languages as they are a component of culture, which reflects the cultural-historical background of the people and many facts of the modern state of the linguistic community. Idioms with cultural semantics are an integral part and one of the means of the language picture of the world for a certain nation. An important point in the study of such idioms is the “vertical” context which is based on the background knowledge of people, and the success of communication is determined by the extent to which the participants of communication have similar background knowledge. We believe that idioms with cultural component should be referred to the units of the “vertical” context, because when using an idiom, the author addresses the reader’s consciousness, operating with the known connotations associated with a particular concept. In this article we studied such concepts as national-cultural component, zoonym component, “vertical” context, analyzed English dictionaries of phraseological units, issued in the 21st century in order to select material for the study. The subject of the research is the characteristics of idioms with a cultural component as a marker of national culture of the speakers of English, as well as the importance of vertical context in the study of this lexis; the purpose of this study is to identify the features of vertical context when working with phraseological units of the English language, which include a national-cultural component (in particular, a zoonym component). The main research methods were the method of continuous sampling, analysis of linguistic and methodological literature on the problem under study, generalization and synthesis of points of view presented in the works of domestic and foreign linguists, the use of corpus and statistical research methods. The results showed that the phraseological units with a cultural component (the component-zoonym “dog”) strongly depend on the historical era in which they were created. These findings show that the study of phraseology from the position of “vertical” context will lead to interesting results in the future and will help to better understand the cognitive processes.

Keywords: phraseology, linguistics, cultural component, vertical context