A COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC STUDY OF AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGY

Abstract

Taking the intertwining of culture and cognition in a holistic nature of phraseologisms as a starting point, we investigate 400 units in Australian English from cognitive and pragmatic perspectives. It is argued that phraseologisms are formed on certain cognitive models that schematically represent real-world situations and shape the inner form of the expressions. The objectives of the study are to find out these models, explain how they configure the image component motivating the idiomatic meaning and pragmatic value of phraseologisms. The findings indicate that the flexibility of metonymy- and metaphor-based models allows a diversity of the inner forms which motivate idiomatic meanings and provide pragmatic efficiency of phraseologisms.