CONSTRUCTIONAL PHRASEMES: DYNAMICS AND FUNCTIONING (BASED ON RNC DATA)

Constructional phrasemes are a special class of phraseological units in Russian. The central part of this category consists of speech forms with a stable lexical composition in which certain valencies are not fi lled, and the image component is absent in meaning. The omitted elements can be both simple and propositional actants. The idiomaticity of idiomatic constructions extends to the structure itself and its fi xed part, rather than to the lexical units that are introduced into it, fi lling the empty slots.
The analysis of corpus data shows that many constructional phrasemes have emerged on the bases of expressions with similar structure, the components of which are used in their common meanings presented in discourse. The transition of such non-idiomatic expressions into phraseological units is usually accompanied by an increase in frequency of use in discourse.