THE METHODS OF TRANSFORMATION OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN THE STORIES OF ANTON CHEKHOV: LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS

The paper gives the characteristics of phraseological units in the early stories of Anton Chekhov and identifies Chekhov’s methods and techniques of creative transformation of phraseological units, the specifics of functioning of phraseological units in the literary text, and the elements of the author's phraseological worldview.

The author describes national-cultural connotation of phraseological images in the writer’s literary texts. National-cultural connotation explains both the modern denotative meaning of a phraseological unit and the mechanisms of its creation and formation.

According to the procedure of linguistic and cultural analysis of phraseological units in the stories of Anton Chekhov, their meanings were correlated with various cultural layers and codes; trope mechanisms being the basis of formation and perception of a phraseological unit were identified. 

The linguistic and cultural analysis of phraseological units allowed identifying that, in the early stories of Anton Chekhov, lexical transformations of phraseological units are the most frequently used method. Multiple functions of use of phraseological expressions were defined: the reflection of individual characteristics of speech of characters; the intensification of a phraseological image and the vividness of its perception by introducing additional shades in the semantics of a phraseological unit (the enhancement of representation functions); the improvement of expressive coloring of speech; giving the additional humorous nuance of speech; the concretization of a phraseological image and its meaning in the context of literary text, etc.

The study allowed discovering that the phraseological worldview in the writer’s works expresses the everyday-empirical experience of living of people, the layer of everyday, material culture. The author uses well-known phraseological units with transparent figurative-motivational basis, but under the writer’s pen, they intensify their expressiveness, become a vivid means of expressing the author’s irony.