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The Problem of Variability in Biblical Phraseological Units // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2023. Issue 1 (225). P. 58-68

The problem of linguistic variability remains acute due to the dynamism of national language development. The study of phraseological units of biblical etymology in the aspect of their variability has recently become increasingly significant, as the fact of wide use of phraseological units derived from biblical texts and stories in various types of discourse is noted. The diversity of variants of biblical phrases requires identifying, organising and structuring the types of their variation. The aim of the research is to identify new variants of biblical phraseological units that are widely used in various discourse types (fiction, media, publicistic, historical, political). Contexts that verify the resulting data of the research were borrowed from the British National Corpus (BNC), News on the Web (NOW) and electronic dictionary Reverso Context (RC). Language material for the research was extracted out of 3 phraseological dictionaries: 1) the bilingual “English-Russian phraseological dictionary” by Alexander V. Kunin, 2) “English-German-Swedish Dictionary of Biblical Phraseology” by Tatyana N. Fedulenkova and others, 3) the multilingual phraseological dictionary “The Mite of Biblical Wisdom” by Zoya K. Adamia and others. The research methods, namely the method of the phraseological identification, the method of the structural and componential analysis, the method of the quantitative analysis and the method of contextual analysis, allow to analyse 350 phraseological units of biblical origin that are actively used in modern English and identify a set of variants that include both usual and occasional simple variants, i.e. lexical and grammatical, quantitative variants of phraseological units and mixed or complex variants of phraseological units. It was found out that along with linguistic variation, phraseological variation is the result of the natural development of language as a system. Variation of biblical phraseological units is not equaled to phraseological synonymy. The analysis of selected biblical phraseological units allowed us to identify the following types of variants: simple variants and complex variants (e.g. substantive-quantitative variants, adjectival-quantitative variants, verbal-quantitative variants) of phraseological units. Within each of the given groups, a division into usual and occasional variants is made. Simple variants are represented by lexical variants (including substantive variants, prepositional variants, prepositional-substantive variants, attributive variants, verbal variants); grammatical variants (including morphological variants and morpho-syntactical variants); quantitative variants (with truncation and addition of components). Truncated parts of a phraseological unit may be represented by three types (truncation of the initial part of the phraseological unit; truncation of the final part of the phraseological unit; mixed truncation). A group of quantitative comparative variants is distinguished, in which the first conjunction (as) as a result of regular truncation becomes optional, resulting in quantitative-variative pairs. A type of mixed variation has been identified, implying the origin of variants by multiple modifications. Substantive-quantitative variants are formed by changing the substantive component together with varying the structure of the phraseological unit by expanding it with a variable component with a preposition. Adjectival-quantitative variants are formed as the result quantitative variation (expansion of the structure of the phraseological unit) coupled with the replacement of the adjectival element. With the help of corpus data, the preference of native speakers for some variants of idioms over others was successfully revealed. The conclusion is made that the studied phraseological units borrowed from the Bible are not static, but are ‘living’, constantly changing language units, widely used in modern English speech. Moreover, both simple and complex variation in the component composition of a given phraseological unit has no significant impact on the invariant meaning of the phraseological unit.

Keywords: biblical phraseology, phraseological units of biblical etymology, phraseological variability, variant, invariant, simple and complex variants, usual and occasional variants