Characteristic of prototypes of biblical phraseology and ways of their transformation to language units

The studies of relationship questions of biblical phraseological units with their prototypes is one of the most important fields of a research in modern linguistics. The relevance of this tendency is explained by the fact that the biblical phraseology has become an integral part of different functional styles in modern European languages and the ontology of the words and expressions of biblical origin, which have entered the language, still remains one of the low-studied linguistic problems. In this paper the definition of the prototype is offered and the short characteristic of specifics of prototypes of biblical phraseological units is submitted: semantically non-transferred variable phrases, variable sentences, set expressions of phraseological character to which set phrases, comparative constructions and expressions of proverbial character belong. Selection of language material for the research was made from the most authoritative translation and explanatory phraseological dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms, namely: 1) from the bilingual "English-Russian phraseological dictionary" by Alexander V. Kunin, 2) from the monolingual explanatory dictionary of idioms of A. Cowie and R. Mackin 'Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. Vol. 1: Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs'. As additional sources encyclopedic and explanatory dictionaries of biblical phraseology by K.N. Dubrovina "The encyclopedic dictionary of biblical phraseological units" and by V.M. Mokiyenko et al. "The explanatory dictionary of biblical expressions and words" were referred to. As the scientific base of the research, the phraseological concept by Alexander V. Kunin is chosen. The complex of the applied methods includes the method of phraseological identification of PUs, the method of the component and semantic analysis of phraseological units, the method of the quantitative analysis, the method of the comparative analysis of phraseological units and their biblical prototypes and the method of the phraseological description. As a result of the research, we find out that the main ways of transformation of biblical prototypes into phraseological units are metaphor, metonymy, symboliza-tion and ellipsis, which leads us to the conclusion that the most common form of semantic transformation, defining ways and means of emergence of biblical phraseological units is full or partial semantic transference of variable combinations of words and sentences, i.e. prototypes of the first group, along with set expressions of phraseological character, quotes and event prototypes.

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