The Lexical-Semantic Features of English Idioms

This article examines the principal lexical and semantic features of English proper idioms — the most prototypical and most opaque category of phraseological units. On the lexical level, the article discusses semantic opacity, structural fixedness, limited grammatical flexibility, the presence of archaic and culturally specific components, polylexical structure, historical and cultural motivation, and stylistic-connotative coloring. On the semantic level, it addresses non-compositionality, figurative and metaphorical motivation, semantic unity (global meaning), connotative and emotive meaning, and polysemy with contextual variation. Keywords

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