Modern trends and concepts in Phraseology

How is motivation related to idiomaticity?

Answer: Idiomaticity of phraseological units is lack of word groups. If a word group does not allow word by word translation it is called idiomatic word groups. For example. to kick the bucket (умереть) in the soup (затруднительном положении) under a cloud (в плохом настроении) - The meaning of a word may be realized by its structure.
A direct connection between the structural pattern of the word and its meaning is called the motivation of a word. Motivation may be morphological, phonetical and semantic. The relationship between morphemic structure and meaning is called morphological motivation. From this point of view the words may be motivated and non- motivated. For example. sing, tell, eat, read, open, go are non-motivated words because each of them has simple stem and one morpheme. If we can see a direct connection between the structural pattern of the word and its meaning we say that this word is motivated. So in most cases the derived and compound words are motivated and simple words are non-motivated. For example. eatable, readable, reader, doll-faced, singer are motivated but eat, read, doll, sing are non-motivated: ring, finger are non-motivated but finger-ring is motivated. The words may be par- tially motivated. For example. «cranberry» is partially motivated because the morpheme «cran» has no meaning.
If we see the connection between the phonetic structure of a word and its meaning we say that the word is phonetically motivated. For example. cuckoo, boom, cock-a doodle-doo, bow-wow, mew-mew, etc. When the meaning of a word is metaphorically extended or when a word is used as a metaphorically extention of the central meaning we say the word is semantically motivated. For example. «He is my mothers. Here «mother» is used metaphorically, the whole sentence means that «he looks after me like my mother*. So the word «mother» is semantically motivated. «He is a fox». («He is cunny»), fox is semantically motivated.