The phraseological meaning construal in the traditional vs. cognitive culture-oriented perspectives

As a point of departure, the paper discusses two approaches to phraseological meaning: traditional and cognitive. Following the latter as well as certain semiotic and cultural accounts of language, semantics, and idiomaticity, I seek to elaborate a cognitive culture-oriented theory of phraseological meaning. This theory is tested against the basis of a representative corpus of selected Russian phraseologisms (more than 1000 items) that describe various aspects of verbal communication, e.g., igrat’ komediyu (lit. to play comedy ), zloj yazyk (lit. an evil tongue ). The results obtained are supported by the cross-cultural study of Russian and English phraseological units.