"The Way We Talk in Our Daily Life (On One Potential Idiom of Russian Speech) "

The paper analyses conversational idioms functioning in Russian
every day oral speech and proposes a typology of idioms collected from
the corpus of everyday speech “One Speech Day” (created at St. Petersburg
State University). The analysis of the corpus material shows that the majority of colloquial idioms can be divided into three groups: the “classical”
idioms fi xed in the dictionaries (*Id) — 26,4 %, the idiomatic interjections
(*IdMezhd) — 24,8 % and the form-idioms (*FId) — 22,4 %. The article reviews the possibility of analyzing colloquial idioms by means of the linguistic survey conducted among the native speakers through the example
of a potential idiom (kopeechku stoit nebezumnuju). The results show that
this expression is probably the result of the contamination of two idioms:
‘kopejki stoit’’ and ‘bezumnye den’gi’. The commentaries of the philologists
concerning the meaning of this unit can be divided into three groups: ‘inexpensive, cheap’ (53,7 %), ‘worth some money’ (a simple statement of value)
(16,7 %) and ‘expensive’ (11,1 %) or ‘very expensive’ (18,5 %). The material
of the speech corpus contains many examples of such new forms that have already been included in active speech use to varying degrees but still do
not have a lexicographic description.