FUNCTIONING OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH A COLORISTIC COMPONENT IN ENGLISH MEDIA TEXTS

Open Access

Abstract

The article studies the functioning of English phraseological units with a coloristic component in media texts. Media-linguistics is one of the actual topics for linguistic researches as the media has quickly penetrated into all spheres of our lives and today it is difficult for us to imagine our everyday life without television, radio, magazines, newspapers and the Internet. The purpose of the article is to dwell on the peculiarities of the usage of idioms with a coloristic component in English media texts that have captured our attention today. The subject of the study is English phraseological units with a coloristic component. The article highlights the terms "phraseology", "phraseological unit" "and idiom", and presents different views on the definition of these concepts. The article outlines the basic features of these concepts and represents various definitions offered by scientists. In the article the term "color naming" is also mentioned as well as the concepts of «media linguistics» and "media text". The article focuses on the first group of media texts, i.e. the news that have the most informative function. Examples of the usage of phraseological units with a coloristic component in the publications of the British online edition of the BBC and the American news source CNN were given. Publications from 2015 to 2019 were analyzed to study modern English and current phraseological units, which made it possible to trace the most popular phraseological units with a coloristic component in British and American English. The article deals with the usage of idioms that include six color names (black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue). Such idioms were found in media texts of various subjects. First of all, political, economic and sports publications on the BBC and CNN were examined. The article describes the meaning of each idiom in terms of its usage in the context of media text, taking into account the possible positive and negative connotations.