Structural and semantic congruence of Bulgarian, Russian and English set expressions: Contrastive-typological research

Abstract

The main aim of the research is to analyze the degree of isomorphism and allomorphy (congruence) of set expressions in three languages - Bulgarian, Russian and English, and to highlight the main factors that have a bearing on the typological affinity of set expressions in these languages. The procedure of the research was two-fold. At the first stage, 4000 idioms were selected from Russian, Bulgarian and English idiomatic dictionaries through the method of random sampling (1334 idioms were selected from each language). For the sake of convenience and comparison, the selected idioms were divided into 5 thematic groups. At the second stage, 850 idioms were further selected for each group through stratified and quota sampling with the aim of subsequent quantification of recurrent keywords in each group. In order to quantify the number of the most frequent keywords in each group and to measure the prevalence of assonance and alliteration, the SPSS software was utilized. The results of the research revealed that the main factors that determine isomorphism and allomorphy among idioms from Bulgarian, Russian and English are (1) typological affinity between Bulgarian and English, (2) genetic kinship, (3) borrowings from English into Russian and Bulgarian and (4) from Russian into Bulgarian, (5) shared idiomatic stock and (6) such extralinguistic factors as the universal makeup of objects and entities, for instance, the same number of functional parts. The research results are relevant for comparative phraseology, areal and contrastive typology as well and for contactology.