Communicative extension of biblical formulae and its transference in the tradition

The paper deals with formula phrases of King James Bible. Substantial wealth and aesthetic qualities of the iconographic scenes have contributed to the process of transformation of the biblical texts in a formulaic expression (repeatedly used lexical units), and their expressive richness contributes to their further meaningful enrichment. David Crystal in «Begat the King James Bible and the English language» analyzed the adaptation of the biblical expressions in modern English language and culture. David Crystal cites 257 formulas. However, in this work, the author makes an attempt to classify adapted formulas according to four possible types of transformations. In addition, the analysis is based on the British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The study of the Bible in the context of the formulas of modern English language may be of interest to a researcher in the sphere of syntagmatics and paradigmatics, primarily based on the appearance of innovative formulaic expressions. The expressions of the Bible that are used by native English speakers are made in two ways: first, as a direct quotation from the Bible; secondly as adapted definable unity. The difference between the adaptation and quote is that for direct quotation referential plan remains unchanged, whereas adaptation leads to various changes (the author classifies these changes into four types of mutations). Different variants of formulae are given; they are registered on the basis of the Bible. The author describes four main types of transformations of formulae phrases, which demonstrate the development of relations in the culture. These four main types are: type A which is reframing of conventional formulae; type Б which is lexical substitution of a key-term; type B which is production of new combinations and forms with new semantic structure, type Г is a description with substitution of a lexeme in the context of a formula, which denotes different events. The author demonstrates that formulae deal with innovative descriptions which are characterized with more detalization. Consequently, the growth of information is described. These four types of mutations, identified by the author, correlate with the kind of isomorphism between the genetic code and semiotic systems.

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