Functions of numbers in korean phraseological units

Abstract

Fixed phrases of Korean like idioms of other languages have their own, national, peculiarities. Components of these phraseological units can be characterized as units that have structural and semantic features together with their own unique particularities. It is only well too known that phraseological units particularly but not exceptionally proverbs and sayings are characterised to have multiple meaning. It is commonly supposed that phraseological units with numeral components to be the particular interest in linguistics. The aim of this paper is to analyse the function of such numeral components as ‘?’ (ten), ‘??’ (one) ? ‘?’ (three) in Korean proverbs that are related to the theme of thievery and thieving. In this article under consideration there were chosen phraseological units related to theme of thievery and thieving. In order to select phraseological units that were used in this paper for illustrative purposes the continuous sampling method was used. In order to make research the method of content analysis was used when there had been made classification of fixed phrases according to the semantics of used numeral. When writing this article, a comparative-contrastive analysis was also applied. We also used the methods of semantic and component analysis to reveal elementary senses in semantics of linguistic units and to compare the meanings of the lexical units of the source and the target. As a result of made analysis we came to the conclusion that there were marked out such semantics of numeral components as quantity, correlation, frequency, space. What is more, analysed numeral components played as well as the role of intensifier of the conveyed meaning.