1. What is the basis of the traditional and oldest principle for classifying phraseological units?
2. What other criteria can be used for the classification of phraseological units?
3. Do you share the opinion that in idioms the original associations are partly or wholly lost? Are we entirely free from the picture built up by the current meanings of the individual words in idioms? Illustrate your answer with different examples.
4. What are the merits and disadvantages of the thematic principle of classification for phraseological units?
5. Explain the semantic principle of classification for phraseological units.
6. What is the basis of the structural principle of classification for phraseological units?
7. Analyse Professor A. I. Smirnitsky's classification system for phraseological units. What is it based on? Do you see any controversial points in the classification system?
8. Discuss the merits of Professor A. V. Koonin's system for the classification of phraseological units. What is it based on? Do you find any points in the classification system which are open to question?
II. a. Read the following text. Compile a list of the phraseological units used in it. Translate them into Russian by phraseological units (if possible) or by free word-groups. On what principle are all these idioms selected?
If you feel under the weather, you don't feel very well, and if you make heavy weather of something, you make it more difficult than it needs to be. Someone with a sunny disposition is always cheerful and happy, but a person with his head in the clouds does not pay much attention to what is going on around him. To have a place in the sun is to enjoy a favourable position, and to go everywhere under the sun is to travel all over the world. Someone who is under a cloud is in disgrace or under suspicion, and a person who is snowed under with work is overwhelmed with it.
When you break the ice, you get to know someone better, but if you cut no ice with someone, you have no effect on them. To keep something on ice or in cold storage is to reserve it for the future, and to skate on thin ice is to be in a dangerous or risky situation. If something is in the wind, it is being secretly planned, and if you have the wind up, you became frightened. To throw caution to the winds is to abandon it and act recklessly, but to see how the wind blows is to find out how people are thinking before you act. If you take the wind out of someone's sails, you gain the advantage over him or her by saying or doing something first. To save something for a rainy day is to put some money aside for when it is needed. To do something come rain or shine is to do it whatever the circumstances. Finally, everyone knows that it never rains but it pours, that problems and difficulties always come together. But every cloud has a silver lining — every misfortune has a good side.
(Журнал Англия, 1973)