Modern English phraseology with the structural component keep: types of variability

Development of variavbility in phraseological units (PUs) is a most productive way to updating of the phraseological fund of the language. This question is especially relevant to modern English which updating at the expense of lexical-morphological means is limited by the analytical system of this language with narrowing of the nomenclature of morphological indices of a word, characteristic of this language. The article is devoted to the research of variavbility in the English verbal phraseological units with the component ‘keep'. The selection of phraseological units containing the verb ‘keep' as the object of the research may be explained by the fact that this verb is one of the most frequent verbs of the static semantics in modern English around which a significant amount of fixed collocations and phraseological units was created. The selection of the language material for the research was made out of the three reliable explanatory phraseological dictionaries: 1) the bilingual "English-Russian phraseological dictionary" by A.V. Kunin, 2) the monolingual explanatory dictionary of phrasal verbs by R. Courtney "Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs", 3) the monolingual explanatory dictionary of idioms by A.P. Cowie and R. Mackin "Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. Vol. 1: Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs". The theoretical basis of the research is the phraseological concept initiated by A.V. Kunin. The complex of methods for the research includes the method of phraseological identification of PUs, the method of the compo-nential, structural and variational analysis of phraseology, the method of the quantitative analysis and the method of the phraseological description. The results of the research lead to the conclusions that the constant-variable dependence of components is characteristic almost of a half of phraseological units with the component ‘keep' and verbal, substantive and prepositive variants are the most widespread among the found lexical variants in the phraseology under study. The level of the average threshold of phraseological stability is supported by the variability of components of a phraseological unit keeping up the identity of the phraseological unit as the unit of the language. The prospects of this research are seen in its value from the typological point of view, i.e. in taking into consideration the variability of phraseological units as the main and universal property of PU-structure, while creating the typological passport of phraseology of the language under study.

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