Phraseological Units With Somatisms in the Chekhov’s Artistic Picture of the World: Universal and Specific Features

The purpose of this article is to describe the results of the study of the originality of Anton P. Chekhov’s use of phraseological units with a somatic component. In phraseology, somatic phraseological units attract the attention of many researchers belonging to different philological schools, because these units occupy one of the central places among the universal expressive means of artistic, journalistic speech, various forms of colloquial speech in any language. The object of study is codified phraseological units with a somatic code and their transformations in the literary texts of A. P. Chekhov. The subject of this study is the artistic and functional specificity of somatic phraseological units, which act as markers of the corporeality phenomenon in the analyzed texts, cognitive factors of the writer’s creative approach to the use of such units. The material for the analysis consists of 128 somatic phraseologisms, selected by the method of continuous sampling from 18 literary texts of various genres: short stories, novels, dramatic works, — as well as several letters authored by Chekhov. According to the results of the study, carried out within the framework of the anthropocentric scientific paradigm using the methods of artistic, phraseological, functional-semantic, cognitive, linguocultural, sociolinguistic, pragmatic analysis, descriptive and quantitative methods, the following conclusions were drawn: 1) In the analyzed material, 60 % of phraseological units that are markers of the characters’ bodily behavior have a distinctly expressed somatic component; 19 % of these units are incomplete, as by functioning as phraseological units, they have lost the somatic components that are associatively present in the speakers’ consciousness and can be restored in speech; 21 % of the used phraseological units characterize bodily behavior without the use of explicit or omitted somatisms. 2) Somatic phraseological units are mostly phraseological unities and combinations, less frequently — blends. In artistic text, unities and combinations often have both primary and accompanying meanings, depending on the situation, where the direct meaning can be primary and the metaphorical accompanying, and vice versa: metaphorical can be primary and direct accompanying. 3) The phraseological unit as a marker of bodily behavior tends towards the syncretic (direct and indirect) nature of marking the character’s bodily behavior. In the works of A. P. Chekhov, various variants of mixing indirect markers of mental or emotional bodily behavior with direct ones prevail. 4) There is a tendency towards social coloring of somatic phraseologisms used in the speech of characters.