Matviienkiv O. General and occasional phraseological units of English in contemporary fictional discourse

This paper focuses on the research of general and occasional idioms of English in contemporary fictional discourse. The problem of description of general and occasional phraseological units and their pragmatic functions in postmodern fiction is solved in this dissertation through a comprehensive approach that integrates generally scientific, generally linguistic and phraseological methods and techniques of the analysis. All general and occasional phraseological units in the fictional works of British writers of postmodern era have been grouped and categorized in accordance with the type of structuraly semantic and grammatical processes based on the morphological classification. Judging from the implemented morphological classification of the phraseological units, we distinguish the following types of phraseological units: substantive, verbal, adverbial, adjectival and interjectional. The most numerous group of them in our study are verbal phraseological units. Functions of occasional phraseological units in postmodern fiction and their structural and semantic transformations are defined by the type of a stable word-combination and also by communicative and pragmatic individual authorial guidelines that are intended to affect the minds of potential readers. Analysis of postmodern fiction enabled us to single out five main types of semantic shifts of a phraseological unit: reducing of the component structure of a phraseological unit; replacement of components of a phraseological unit; certain grammatical phenomena within a phraseological unit; contextual rethinking of a phraseological units. The research of the idiomatic expressionsh of the English postmodern fiction reveals not only the notable features of the artistic talent of postmodern authors, but also helps to clarify important facts in the development of literary language (contemporary language of fiction) and to make a considerable contribution into the research of problems that concern functional phraseological stylistics, discourse and cognitive phraseology expanding linguistic horizons for further studies in the field of a nowaday phraseology or idiomatic studies with further application into the university curricula.