The Author’s Transformations of the National Phraseological Units in Yevhen Gutsalo’s Whimsical Prose.

Abstract

The thesis represents a complex analysis of the author’s transformations of the national phraseological units (hereafter PhU) in Yevhen Gutsalo’s whimsical prose. On the voluminous empirical material (about 7 thousand units), selected from the writer’s whimsical trilogy (“The Borrowed Man”, “The Private Life of a Phenomenon”, “Parade of Planets”), the status of the phraseological unit in the whimsical prose is identified and studied; its functions in revealing the author’s implications and peculiarities of interaction with the context are surveyed.

The paper offers the improved terminological inventory of phraseological transformations in terms of their hyper-hyponymic nomination. The typology of the author’s transformations is developed, it takes into account the changes in the structure and / or the PhU’s semantics; means of the author’s interpretation of the analysed units are systematised; the expression of each means in the texts under study is classified; the productivity of the phraseological changes and their pragmatic effect are defined. The combination of several means of the author’s transformations within a single PhU is surveyed; absolute phraseological innovations of the author are singled out and studied.

The research supports the systemic character of the author’s phraseobuilding, used by Yevhen Gutsalo in his whimsical trilogy; the paper also reveals the value of the author’s phraseological transformations of national PhUs when creating the genre, the text, the plot, the title of the whimsical prose.

The introduction contains the general characteristic of the paper where the choice of the research topic is explained; the paper goal and the tasks are stated; the object and the subject are formulated; the empirical material is clarified; the research methods are established; the scientific novelty, theoretical and practical value are outlined; the author’s publications on the topic are highlighted, etc.

The first chapter “Theoretical and methodological principles of the phraseological transformations research in the text” outlines the works on phraseology by such prominent scholars as L. Avksentiev, M. Alefirenko, S. Gavrin, V. Zhukov, O. Kunin, V. Mokienko, O. Molotkov, L. Skripnik, H. Udovichenko, D. Uzhchenko, M. Shansky which allows to specify the inventory of the PhU qualifying features and to offer the researcher’s interpretation of the PhU which is viewed as the text formed within the national discourse framework and which functions as the specific national mentality expression. The use of such text (i.e. PhU) promotes certain features of the language and requires the application of specific grammatical and lexical rules, the consequence of which is impossibility to interpret the PhU as the word or the combination of words, thus makes it hard to stratify all PhUs into the groups of word-combinations and sentences. Each PhU is a cultural text and, in addition, the result of the reality interpretation process as opposed to its nomination.

The second chapter of the research “Structural-semantic transformations of the PhUs in Yevhen Gutsalo’s whimsical prose: ways of implementation, the authorial methods, functional motivation” is devoted to the detailed analysis of the ways PhUs transform structurally and semantically, which is represented by 10 means stratified into three groups: the PhU’s qualitative change (the substitution of the components); the PhU’s quantitative change (the PhU’s spread, the PhU’s shortening, phraseological hint, developed metaphor, contamination, sub-phraseological derivation); the PhU’s structural change (phraseological inversion, syntactic transformation, distant placement of the PhU’s components). In addition, the research points out to the high productivity of the following structural-semantic means of transformation: the PhU’s components substantivisation; the PhU’s componential structure development; phraseological hint and varied numerous examples of their authorial expression.

The third chapter “Semantic modifications of the PhUs in Yevhen Gutsalo’s whimsical prose: ways of implementation, the authorial methods, functional motivation” outlines the system of semantic modification means which are represented in 8 means. It is found that the following means of semantic modification are characterised by high level of productivity: the change of modality, PhU’s comparativity, double actualisation.