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О. В. Теутул

Буковинський державний університет економіки та фінансів

Науковий керівник: (Росія) докт. філол. наук В. В. Михайленко

Semantics of monetary idioms

Semantics of phraseological units has been frequently studied question in the field of linguistics recently. Kvetko P., Tkachuk T. and Kovaliuk Yu. are ones, who studied phraseological units on their semantic level. Linguistic idiom is defined as a multiword construction [3, 23] and a semantic unit which meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of its constituents, and has a non-productive syntactic structure. Idioms constitute one of the most elusive areas in intercultural exchanges. Apparently, fixed expressions have a relativist nature and are culture bound. However, if we have a closer look at the conceptual world behind idiomatic phrases, a universal world of concepts arises. Universality lies behind the conceptual metaphors shaping the idiom. Most linguistic works and encyclopedias highlight the following features of idioms:

• lexical complexity and semantic simplicity;

• the meaning of an idiom is not derivable from the meanings of its individual parts;

• fixed form or invariability – the number of paradigmatic variants (if there are any) is limited;

• figurativeness [4, 12].

Classifying idioms according to idiomatic classes is a way of dealing with their

miscellaneousness. Idiomatic classes also allow for systematic analysis of idiomatic derivation. In compliance with Tkachuk, idioms can be divided into sentential and non-sentential (sayings and proverbs) [4, 124]. The latter ones can be further divided into verbal idioms (pound to a penny with the Ukrainian equivalent “битись об заклад, закладатися”, cost a pretty penny meaning “дорого обійтися”) and verbless idioms, which are mainly nominal (a cash cow “що заробляє багато грошей”, pinch pennies meaning “бути жадним або тринькати гроші”), adjectival (pink pound, which in the UK denotes an idiom for the economic power of gay people, grey pound meaning the economic power of elderly people in the UK, penny plain and twopence coloured meaning “дешевий і показний”) and adverbial (on a shoestring meaning having no money at all) [2, 13].

We have traced that the meaning of the idioms can be sometimes explained by the meaning of their components, whereas it happened so in the world view of people that they associate something bad, ugly and negative with a small quantity of money or coins, but not banknotes at all. For example, penny gaff [1, 752] meaning “дешевий театр, низькопробний мюзік – хол, балаган” or penny-in-the-slot-smile [1, 752] which is not a sincere smile and is translated into Ukrainian as “холодна завчена посмішка”, penny soul never came to twopence [1, 753] meaning a greedy person “дріб’язкова людина ніколи не досягне успіху”, penny wise and penny foolish (British) and cent wise and dollar foolish (American) [1, 753] “людина, що заощаджує на дрібницях, а втрачає на великому, недалека людина”.

The positive phenomena are otherwise compared to banknotes, because nice and beautiful things have to deal with welfare, rich people who have got money. That is why very often people denote the poor as those having coins only, and the rich as having much money. The idiom in for a penny, in for a pound [1, 753] is widely used nowadays. If something is worth doing then it is a case of in for a penny, in for a pound, which means that when gambling or taking a chance, you might as well go the whole way and take all the risks, not just some. However, when talking about a spendthrift, we can say penny wise, pound foolish [1, 753] bearing in mind that someone who is penny wise, pound foolish can be very careful or mean with small amounts of money, yet wasteful and extravagant with large sums, showing one’s obscurity about spending money.

Thus, we may conclude that usually monetary phraseological units have to do with money in general and denote things or people dealing with money. The semantics of such idioms can be easily explained by the meaning of each consistent part or otherwise we have to go deeper for the meaning.