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Section 4. Linguistics
Section 4. Linguistics
Bashmakova Irina Stepanovna, Irkutsk State Technical University, Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor, Faculty of Applied Linguistics E-mail: bis61@mail.ru
English idioms with proper name in semiotic aspect
Abstract: The article deals with the semiotic status of proper name in English idioms. The main directions of contextualization in terms of discourse are determined. Idiomatic contexts with proper names are considered as mythological discourse components. Idioms with proper name are originated in its mythological function in panchronic discourses. Due to the fact, any idiom is the possessor of concise illocution. In the given article the terms phraseologism and idiom are considered as fully interchangeable.
Keywords: English idiom, phraseologism, mythological discourse, proper name, anthroponym, semiotic status, cognitive center, categorization, taxis relationships, symbolic meaning, sign, symbol.
Due to the awareness of need to research interaction between a person and his language not only as a product “ergon”, but also as a language producing activity “ener-geya” [1], in linguistics, in studying object there has been a shift to the anthropological paradigm. The appeal to the human factor in language-study means important changes in basic paradigmatics. Furthermore, it means the transition from the immanent approach to the anthropological one, which suggests language-studying in close relation with a person and his consciousness, spiritual and practical activities. The aim of the given article is to determine the semiotic status of a proper name, anthroponym in particular, in English idioms. This goal involves the following objectives: to determine the main direction of proper name contextu-alization (PN) in discourse, stating proper name as cognitive center of English idioms [2], to formulate the principles of interaction between the idiom and its context in cognitive and semiotic perspectives. The theme topicality is determined by a new approach in the interpretation of idiomatic context with proper name, which is considered to be a symbol of mythological discourse.
Research methods: phraseological identification, comparison, analysis.
The anthropological linguistics initial thesis is a claim that language is a constitutive property of a human being. Hence, it is impossible to learn a language in itself, not going beyond its limits, without contacting its creator — a person. However, a person without a name does not exist in the world. The name is as old as a person himself. Modern scholars are unanimous in view that proper name content, anthroponym, in particular, is determined not by formal but its content characteristics, due to the fact that senseless and meaningless names don’t exist in their genesis.
The peculiarity of proper name in free use dictates the urgent need to study its functioning characteristics in idioms, such as: the patience of Job, Augean stables, a Judas kiss, as old as Methuselah, Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune, a Roland for an Oliver, the sword of Damocles, and gives a basis for the idiom with proper name segregation into a special group.
So far, in phraseology there is a view that all components of a phraseological unit take equal part in its formation [3; 4]. However, it can’t be asserted in case of idioms with proper name, on the reason that any proper name in such phraseolo-gisms is the cognitive center of the unit, the center which organizes specific mythological knowledge [2]. The proper name (anthroponym) as the center of proposition and illocution contemporaneously, irradiates to the rest idiom components by its symbolic meaning.
Most of the proper names have a rich lexical background, fixed in people’s memory as rigid associations-personalities. These personalities are kept in people’s mind as myths and legends. They might be the myths about historical events or heroes, fiction characters, the Bible individuals. The people’s association is extremely important. Due to that we are to study language along with the history and the ethnos’ culture. As phraseology is onomastic science, from the position of which — names reflect not only the national identity, but inform us about people’s peculiar customs, traditions, the way of thinking. As a rule, the Bible, historical events, literature are the sources of idioms with proper name formation. Hence, it is possible to assume that proper name, being a repository of knowledge, contains an action, a small history fragment. To prove it, one example, taken from an article by B. Shaw, which contains the idiom Jack the Ripper is illustrated. In the extract, the author has a discussion about the work of Zola and Victor Hugo.
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English idioms with proper name in semiotic aspect
.. .As an example of how to cater for such readers, we may take Zola’s Bete Humaine. It is in all its essentials a simple and touching story, like Prevost’s Manon Lescaut. But into it Zola has violently thrust the greatest police sensation of the XIX century: the episode ofJack the Ripper. Jack’s hideous neurosis is no more a part of human nature that Caesar’s epilepsy or Gladstone’s missing finger. One is tempted to accuse Zola of having borrowed it from the newspapers to please his customers just as Shakespear used to borrow stories of murder and jealousy from the tales and chronicles of his time... [5].
The idiom Jack the Ripper is based on the definite historical information about a personality, Jack by name, who lived in London and killed many women. The events, happened in the 1888, were officially recorded. Since that time, Jack the Ripper is a nickname assigned to a serial killer who brutally murdered an incredible number of girls in the slums of London.
For further analysis, it is necessary to agree on the meaning of the terms “discourse”, “text”, “context”. In this article, the point of view of T. van Diyk and B. Kintch in the field of discourse and text is taken as the basis [6]. According to their approach, discourse is a broad and universal linguistic object, covering not only the linguistic structure of the speech product, but also the typical parameters of the communicative situation, a strategy of creating communication. In contrast to the discourse, text, by T. van Dijk, is more specific and narrow phenomenon, which doesn’t go beyond the actual structural and semantic parameters of speech fragment. In speech activity, communicants, depending on their role at a certain point, can move in both directions: from the discourse to the text, and vice versa. The first way is search for linguistic means to express the information that speaker/writer is going to tell the listener/reader, i. e. from the discourse to the text. The second way is listener’s/reader’s action. To penetrate deeper into the meaning of a particular text, the interpreter derives the information from “o’ertext” discourse. Discourse gives an idea about things or people, their properties and relations, about events or actions i. e. a fragment of the world, which is named “situation”.
A detailed excursus into the mentioned above theory has been done to state that one of the results of text understanding is its meaning representation in episodic memory in the form of text base. Retracing to the given above example with the English idiom Jack the Ripper, we can conclude that in people’s memory, the name Jack together with the word the ripper in the given word-combination will always be referred to a definite person, Jack, in connection with fixed negative information which describes cruelty of a woman hater, once lived in London. The anthroponym Jack in the word-combination is that element of the idiom that implies a set of unchanged attributes like cruelty, callousness, ruthlessness. Without a doubt, the proper name Jack in the idiom Jack the Ripper has its prototype. This prototypical image was enclosed into the idiom under the myth conditions, where myth is necessarily symbol [7]. Hence, the symbolic function of anthroponyms in phraseologisms is a major one.
Since ancient times, symbol is the object of studying of professionals dealt with philosophy, semantics, ethnography, folklore and other fields of human knowledge. Greek philosophers interpreted symbol as a real life function, as an ideal model of the Universe, disintegrating in endless rows of its constituent elements. During the Renaissance, there was nothing new in the theory of symbol, but there was a noticeable shift in the perception of a character as a multivalued unit. G. Hegel, after the German romantics, emphasizing the rationalistic and linguistic sides of symbol based on the conventionality, defines symbol as external existence, given to the contemplation, which might be perceived in comprehensive meaning [8].
In the given article, proper names in idioms are interpreted as symbol, with special indicating the fact of anthro-ponyms’ close connection with the primordial referent. In other words, these proper names symbolize the image which obtained steadiness, which is kept in mind in invariable representations through centuries. To prove the affirmation about proper name symbolic meaning when the latter is included in idioms, the following example is given.
Lord Rockingham took office in 1782, his political creed was still in its earlier period of liberal emphasis. The Ministry of the Rockingham Whigs that summer, left a deep impression for good on our public life, because it passed Burke’s Economic Reform Bill, which greatly reduced the patronage of government in sinecures and places, and rendered it impossible for anyone ever again to bribe Parliament wholesale, as Walpole, Newcastle and George III had done. The Augean stables were half swept out [9].
In the extract from the “History of England” by Trevelyan G. M., the reader’s attention is focused on the idiom Augean stables in the context of a historical reference. Outwardly, the use of the idiom is inappropriate. However, under more careful analysis, one can observe the author’s intention aimed to show the importance and complexity of Burke’s economic reform, firstly, and secondly, the state of affairs during the time of Walpole and George III. The use of the idiom Augean stables, which is a symbol of neglect, contaminated place, helps readers to understand a true situation in the government of Britain in 1782, specifically: excessive welfare of some leaders of the sinecures, bribes received by members of the Parliament to lobby personal interests of minority. In the idiom Augean stables the “move” from denotative meaning to the predicative one is implemented. In other words, the meaning is fixed at the level of axiology (Eternal World) [10], a characteristic feature of which is a complete lack of taxis relations, which, in turn, is the main feature of a mythological semiotics, obtaining by proper name. The symbol in the given example (dirty place) is not just a sign of some events, but it contains the generalized principle of further disclosure of implied semantic content, the deplorable state of affairs in the parliament, exactly. A symbol is a common generating unit, i. e. autonomous semantic system “programmed” for some new origin of multiplicity of personal meanings, subordinated to the symbol integrity.
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Section 4. Linguistics
To confirm the affirmation of symbolic nature of anthroponym, incorporated in idiom, a number of examples with English idiom Every Tom, Dick and Harry are considered.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry — any person:
a) I’m not going out with any Tom, Dick or Harry. If Ronald doesn’t invite me, I won’t go out at all [11].
b) If we were to listen to the half-baked ideas of every Tom, Dick and Harry you know what we’d have? I’ll tell you. Anarchy [12].
c) As for qualified guides here, there is no legislation for giving them a licence, so that any Tom, Dick or Harry can work as a guide and give not only wrong information, but cause further chaos by not knowing his way about [12].
When analyzing the example with the idiom every Tom, Dick and Harry, the first question that might occur is why these names (Tom, Dick, Harry) were accepted as the basis for the phraseological meaning “just any”. According to the research [2], in this case, the frequency of use plays an important role, as: Tom is the most popular name in England, Dick — in Scotland, Harry — in Ireland. The factor of frequency in indeterminated idioms plays a principal role, along with the phonetic factors such as alliteration, rhyme, folk etymology. As the research showed, the anthroponym ‘Jack’ is a structural component of about 30 phraseological units; the anthroponym “Tom” is used in more than 16 idioms, like Tom Fool, Tom Tiddler’s ground, Old Tom, more (people) know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows, Tom o’Bedlam, Tom Tailor, etc. In the given idioms, the individuated function “to be ordinary” can be observed. Taking into consideration the examples with the given above English idiom, it can be concluded that the anthroponyms Tom, Dick, Harry symbolize ordinary persons. The names, together with the indicator any/every, express some negative hint. So, the heroine Sess will not go anywhere with everyone she meets if Ronald
doesn’t invite her personally (a); if one listens to stupid ideas of common people it will inevitably lead to anarchy (b); if any person without special training starts working as a guide, nothing good will come of it (c). From the infinite number of predicates inherent to the names Tom, Dick, Harry only one component was selected — to point that a person does not belong to high society (a), to emphasize that people don’t have any specific intelligence and knowledge (b, c). In the idiom every Tom, Dick and Harry the anthroponyms “work” as internal predicates which remained in people’s memory as symbol of mediocrity.
It should be noted that all events related to individuals (Jack, Augeas, Tom, Dick, Harry, etc.) are interpreted in the form of myths, the form of knowledge representation, which allows to assert about cognitive and semiotic statuses of proper names, incorporated in idioms.
Conclusion
1. Proper name in idioms, anthroponym in particular, is a symbol.
2. In English idioms with proper names the symbolic nature of anthroponym is expressed by inner predication.
3. Proper name in idioms is a single, unique predicate because of its semiotic status. The essence of the latter is that the idiom is endowed with the properties of symbolism on the one hand, and the predication, on the other.
4. From the perspective of semiotic relations that is an unusual combination, as normally, symbol is a name with “undeveloped” syntax but with great pragmatic significance. The predicate, on the contrary, has high mobility, “cosmopolitanism” in relation to nominal semantic units.
5. The semiotic status can be fixed by special context, which helps to reproduce the main features of the prototypical situation. Thus, an idiom with anthroponym can be interpreted adequately only in the context of discourse.
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