Contents introduction chapter phraseological units with names of animals and their distinguishing features

Classification of phraseological units with names of animals by their origins:

Phraseological units with names of animals



Have similar meaning in other languages, but have different components

Biblical origin

Created by English writers and primarily belonged to the English

By this classification we’ve made an analysis that showed the following results. All 215 phraseological units with names of animals in English we can divide by their origins into four groups, because in English there are a lot of phraseological units that exist in the language very long time and it is difficult to find out their ways of formation, their origin. Therefore in the analysis we’ve made some changes.

Only 17 phraseological units have Biblical origin (e.g. golden calf, dead dog), 34 phraseological units were created by famous writers and well-known people (e.g. a fly on the wheel), 97 phraseological units have similar meaning in other languages (e.g. take the bull by the horns, when the cat’s away, the mice will play) and the rest phraseological units have unknown origin (67). The result is showed in the following diagram:

After investigation of all classifications of phraseological units with names of animals in English by different authors, we’ve made our own classification based on the classifying phraseological units by the types of animals. It means that we’ve divided them into 3 big groups: animals and bird, and insects. Animals and birds are subdivided into domestic and wild animals and birds.

Phraseological units with names of animals

Domestic

Animals



Wild





Domestic

Birds




Wild



Insects



Fishes

And on the basis of this classification we’ve divided all found phraseological units into these groups: 169 animals (e.g. dog’s life, drunk as a drowned mouse, white elephant), 34 birds (e.g. to kill the goose that laid golden eggs, a bird of passage), 9 insects (e.g. a fly in the ointment), 3 fishes (e.g. a big fish in a little pond).