THE NOMINATIVE AND THE COMMUNICATIVE LEVELS OF THE LANGUAGE STRUCTURE: TO WHAT EXTENT THE REPRODUCIBILITY AND IDIOMATICITY OF UNITS ARE INHERENT TO THEM?

The article shows that the properties of reproducibility and idiomaticity of units take place at all semantic levels of the language structure (lexemes, word-combinations (mostly hypotactic), sentences), but the degree of their presence at different levels is different. For words, the named properties are practically obligatory: all words, except potential ones, are reproducible and idiomatic; what is more, non-derivative words are completely idiomatic, the derivatives are partly idiomatic, and the motivation of morphemic derivatives has an abstract logical-grammatical character (in contrast to the visual-figurative motivation of the phrasemes). In the syntagmatics of words, phrasemes constitute an insignificant minority of word-combinations, but their absolute amount, taking into account the mass of non-idiomatic and weakly idiomatic phrasemes, is large and, in all probability, exceeds the number of lexemes. At the level of predicative units, the number of reproducible units (relative and absolute) is minimal (in comparison with the levels of words and word-combinations); the property of idiomaticity is also characteristic of utterances to a minimum degree. The idiomatic nature of predicative clichés is created with the help of semantic mechanisms belonging to two levels of the language — grammar (the idiomaticity of a number of sentence models) and vocabulary (imagery or lexical-semantic non-reality). These mechanisms are not specific to predicative clichés; they are quite common in the freely created utterances. The proportions of freely created and cliched linguistic means, different for different levels, correspond to different functions of the language — to participate in thought processes and to be a reliable and economical means of communication.