“The Good Samaritan” in a New Linguistic Space

The object of the study is one of the most common phraseological units of biblical origin in various types of modern English discourse – the Good Samaritan Bibleism. The subject of this study is the frequency of the phraseological unit chosen for analysis and its functional orientation. In order to determine the linguistic status of a stable and reproducible combination of words with a completely or partially reinterpreted meaning, the method of phraseological identification proposed by the founder of English phraseology A.V. Kunin was used. The following methods and techniques were used in the course of the study: a) non-paradigmatic methods and techniques of linguistics (descriptive method and its methods, contextual analysis); b) methods and techniques of text linguistics; c) methods of studying general and biblical phraseology. As a result of a quantitative syntactic analysis of contexts placed in national corpora, four most common functions of the considered biblical phraseology good Samaritan were identified, the percentage of which is represented in the following figures: a) the function of the subject ‒ 21%, b) the complement function ‒ 18%, c) the definition function ‒ 44%, and d) the function of the nominal part of the compound nominal predicate is 10%. The results of this work are supposed to be used in the construction of typological parallels of the functioning of biblical phraseological units.