Semantics of phraseological units featuring direct kinship terms in modern media texts
- DOI
- 10.5922/pikbfu-2024-2-2
- Pages
- 18-32
Abstract
This article analyses how media texts utilise phraseological units featuring family relationship vocabulary, aiming to identify the relationship between the semantics of kinship terms and the overall phraseological meaning while describing possible semantic shifts in the understanding of these phraseological units by modern Russian native speakers. Empirically, the study draws on the newspaper corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. A broad understanding of phraseology is adopted, encompassing phraseological expressions and fixed naming units. Continuous sampling methods were employed, along with observation, lexicographic, lexico-semantic and contextual analysis, systematisation and classification of linguistic material.
The analysis demonstrates that contemporary media language unveils the semantic richness of phraseological units containing kinship terms, elucidates the cultural connotations embedded within them and highlights usage trends, including individual variations in how native speakers interpret such expressions. A comparison of dictionary definitions and usage contexts made it possible to identify four types of connections between the meaning of a family relationship term and the idiomatic meaning of a phraseological unit: the preservation of the semantics of consanguinity in the meaning of the phraseological unit; the dependence of phraseological semantics on the figurative meaning of the kinship component; the augmentation of the meaning of the fixed expression; the development of a figurative phraseological meaning that does not directly reflect kinship semantics. It is demonstrated that media texts favour phraseological units that express direct kinship through patrilineal units.