Chapter 1 lexicology as a part of linguistics: types and approaches

3.2 The Role of the Phraseological Units in the Book “The Moon and Sixpence”
In general, English and American linguists limit themselves to compiling diverse words, word groupings, and phrases that are interesting from the perspective of their origin, style, usage, or any other characteristic that makes them unique. Although these units are frequently referred to as idioms, no attempt has been made to study them as a distinct class of linguistic units or a particular class of word-groups. There are many proverbs, sayings, and different lexical units of all kinds in American and English dictionaries of unconventional English, slang, and idioms, as well as other extremely valuable reference books, but they typically do not try to establish a trustworthy standard to distinguish between variable word-groups and phraseological units. There have been attempts to take various approaches to the phraseology issue. However, there has been some disagreement up to this point regarding the distinguishing characteristics of phraseological units from other word groupings and the types of phrases that are legitimately referred to as phraseological units. The difficulty in defining the distinction between phraseological units and free or changeable word-groups may be a major contributing factor to the problem's complexity. The so-called free word groupings are only marginally free since the lexical and grammatical valencies of its constituent words serve as the basic boundaries of collocability, bringing at least some of them dangerously near to set-phrase status. Over the past twenty years or so, phraseology has seen a significant increase in interest. Prior to then, phraseology was viewed by general linguists as "idiom researchers and lexicographers cataloging and investigating various sorts of rather frozen idiomatic idioms," but luckily, this perception has changed.
Phraseology may be compared to a museum that collects examples of a country's cultural practices. According to this viewpoint, this region of vocabulary is not only the most colorful but also likely the most inclusive, and it draws the majority of its resources from the very depths of everyday speech. Furthermore, phraseology constitutes one of the most expressive fields of linguistics, along with the study of synonyms and antonyms. It is difficult to determine the boundaries of phraseology precisely because of its diversity and variety of phrases. Phraseological units, often known as idioms, are word groups having a predetermined lexical structure. It can imply any of the following:

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  familiar to native speakers of the given language
  
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  generally figurative
  
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  can’t be derived from the meanings of the component parts of the phraseological unit.
  

In other words, phraseological units are highly idiomatic word groupings that are replicated as pre-made units rather than being freely built up in speech.
The historical evolution of the target language has an impact on the meanings of phraseological units. Three categories of phraseological units are distinguished based on the level of motivation:

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