Article
Article name Downtoners in the Definitions of the English Phraseological Units of Gradual Semantics
Authors Tkachenko S.G. Postgraduate Student, curuxa.sabia@gmail.com
Bibliographic description Tkachenko S. G. Downtoners in the Definitions of the English Phraseological Units of Gradual Semantics // Humanitarian Vector. 2017. Vol. 12, No. 2. PP. 58–63.
Section FOREIGN PHILOLOGY
UDK 811.111`373.7
DOI
Article type
Annotation Grading is a universal means of reflecting knowledge of amount, degree, intensity or evaluation of an object. The study of grading semantics of phraseological units is an actual trend in linguistics as it may add to the better understanding of value system, notion of standard and deviation from it, typical of the English society. The object of the study is English phraseological units in which definition the downtoners are recorded. The subject is the semantic peculiarities and the role of adverbs denoting low degree of a quality in the definition of the English idioms. The adverbs less and little are most frequently used, such downtoners as slightly, small (amount), not enough are relatively often used. All the other downtoners (almost, nearly, rather, few, fairly, least, short, quite, just) are used occasionally. The method of component analysis made it possible to state that the low degree meaning can be verbalized either by the use of isolated downtoner in a definition or by its combination with intensifiers or other downtoners. In lexicographical definitions of the phraseological units the grading semantics can be actualized by grading either one or several qualities, with each having grading mark of its own.
Key words gradation, grading, downtoner, deintensification, phraseological units
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