PHRASEOLOGISMS WITH THE COMPONENT ‘FOOD’ IN ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The article offers a comprehensive analysis of Ukrainian and English idioms that include the semantic component “food,” focusing on their linguistic structure, cultural background, and functional usage. A comparative examination of gastronomic idioms in both languages demonstrates that food-related imagery serves as an important symbolic resource through which speakers express culturally embedded values, social norms, and historical traditions. Ukrainian and English phraseological systems employ different food products as key metaphorical markers, reflecting the unique culinary practices and value systems of each culture. At the same time, a number of shared features have been identified: both languages display isomorphic tendencies in the formation of linguistic stereotypes, while also exhibiting allomorphic characteristics in the ways speakers conceptualise everyday experiences through food-related metaphors.

The analysis revealed notable quantitative differences in the types of idioms: in Ukrainian, the majority of food-related phraseological units are phraseological fusions (59%), characterised by a high degree of semantic opacity, whereas in English, phraseological units of a more transparent or semi-transparent type are more widespread (54%). This distinction highlights varying cognitive and cultural mechanisms underlying idiom formation in the two languages.

A stylistic and functional investigation further showed that idioms containing the “food” component are predominantly used in colloquial and artistic registers in both English and Ukrainian. They serve to enrich expressive speech, convey emotional colouring, and reinforce evaluative meanings. A significant commonality between the two languages is the relative scarcity of food-related idioms belonging to exclamatory, coarse, or vulgar stylistic layers; such expressions constitute only a marginal portion of the overall corpus. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how gastronomic imagery functions as a cross-cultural linguistic phenomenon and may be useful for further studies in phraseology, cultural linguistics, and translation theory.