SPECIFIC FEATURES OF AUTHOR’S IDIOMS IN RUSSIAN LITERARY TEXTS OF THE 19th CENTURY

Author’s idioms are understood in two main senses: as individual features of the use of idioms (author’s modifi cations of form and semantics, individual choice of idioms from a near-synonymous series) and as the creation of unique expressions. In the latter case, we can talk about the author’s idioms in the strict sense, or the author’s idioms proper. We propose to distinguish the following types of author’s use of idioms: lexical modifi cations, grammatical transformations, semantic modifi cations of idioms, author’s statistic universals, author’s dearchaisms and author’s idioms proper. The article discusses specifi c features of author’s use of idioms in Russian fi ctional texts from the 19th century. Diffi culties in identifying the author’s idioms proper are also described on the basis of corpus data. The limitations of the proposed approach are indicated, arguments are presented for the expediency of its use as satisfying the criteria of objectivity. The study of the author’s idioms is important not only for describing the features of the literary text and the style of the writer, but also for a thorough semantic analysis of phraseology. In other words, the author’s phraseology demonstrates both the potential of the phraseological system and deviations from the existing standard.