О русских и литовских зоонимных фразеологизмах, выражающих абстрактные понятия

ENComparative research focusing on zoomorphic phrasal units is not very common, although they are found in many languages of the world in great abundance. Publication of an ideographic dictionary of Russian phraseologisms including names of animals (Kozlova, 2001) provided an opportunity to carry out a comparative research of zoomorphic phraseologisms in different languages. The article deals with Lithuanian and Russian zoomorphic phraseologisms, the comparative analysis of which shows that their meaning is not limited to the metaphoric expression of human characteristics but for defining abstract concepts as well, such as being, space, time, quantity, quality, succession. An ideographic description of zoomorphic phraseologisms was carried out using the concept scheme by P. Xallig and V. Vartburg, adapted by T. Kozlova. 257 Lithuanian and 77 Russian phraseologisms containing animal names were analysed. Tire research showed that 49 Lithuanian and 42 Russian zoonyms with the meaning of abstract concepts and categories contain the same names of animal creatures, e.g. dog, louse, herring, flea, rooster, cat, fly, mare, etc. It was also found that the semantics of the majority of zoomorphic phraseologisms is connected with the concepts of quality and quantity as well as time both in Lithuanian and Russian.