English and German Phraseological Units with the Somatic Component Fist/Faust in Terms of Linguistic, National and Cultural Specific Features

The article is concerned with a comparative analysis of selected German and English fixed phrases with the somatic component Faust (Germ.) and fist (Engl.) aimed at revealing cross-language relations in terms of their identical and different componential structures of meaning as well as determining their national and cultural specificity. Overall, 28 German and 20 English phraseological units were selected for the further analytic investigation after being classified as nominal, adjectival, adverbial and verbal, with lexical and grammatical meaning of different parts of speech being prioritized. It should be stressed that technical terms and German compounds were not included in the analysis. Based on the principle of interrelation between a person and language, in this work, the author is guided by the idea of integration of linguo-cognitive and linguo-culturological aspects. According to one of classifications, fist/Faust is related to the class of natural somatisms, taking into account the fact of their functional necessity regarded as an inherent characteristic. This idea is confirmed from the perspective of "expression events", where fist/Faust is considered as a demonstrator of processes and events, making weird or hindered facts evident and accessible to observers. Situational manifestations of the somatism are bodily and physiological movements, physical conditions and qualities that influence characteristics of lexical units of the "fist and Faust" nominative field revealing the same basic cross-language semantic features, i.e. power and force. The etymological analysis provides a more comprehensive idea of the fist/Faust somatism. The denotation of both of them is related to the numeral five and the collocation the clenched hand/die geballte Hand. At the same time, the somatism is associated with the concomitant national-cultural concept of fist law/Faust Recht regarding a property settlement. Methodologically, this research relies on the following guidelines: comparative analysis of German and English phraseological units with the semantic somatic component fist / Faust; acceptance of the objective similarity between the compared lexical units in both languages as a basis; partial use of the cognitive approach; use of theoretical sources and the corpora of both languages. The method of phraseological identification underlies the selection of lexical units to be analysed, which implies their structural and semantic stability, redefining and separability. The key findings of the research are consistent with the author's expectations. Insignificant correlational discrepancies are revealed in the use of phraseological units with the fist/Faust somatic components within the phrase-semantic field of power, authority, force, which confirms a universal functioning of the somatism in both languages. The prevalence of non-equivalent fixed expressions reflects the common specific features of the phraseological systems in both languages. Distinctions in the other groups are caused by uniqueness of the systems of images, inherent to the phrasicons of German and English.

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