CORPUS METHODS IN STUDYING POLYSEMANTISM IN ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

The article deals with phraseological polysemanticism in English language – an interesting phenomenon when one phraseological unit receives more than one meaning throughout its history. At the same time all these meanings are united by one semantic meaning. This helps to differentiate homonymic phraseological units from polysemantic phraseological units. Polysemantic phraseological units are not numerous comparing to monosemantic ones, that’s why they lack attention of linguists and this paper contributes to this area. In this paper the authors decided to show how corpus methods can be used to collect polysemantic English phraseological units, to study them and to find out their types and their characteristic features. In addition the authors presented their point of with on the problem of differentiation of polysemantic phraseological units and phraseological units with tendency to homonymy. In conclusion the authors give their recommendations how different corpus methods can be used in studying of phraseological units.