TYPE OF THE EARLY BILINGUALISM AS A FACTOR DETERMINING THE PHRASEOLOGICAL FRAGMENT OF THE LANGUAGE PICTURE OF THE WORLD OF BILINGUALS

He article is devoted to the research of the phraseological part of the language picture of the world of the Russian-Greek middle-school pupils attending national school of Cyprus every day and the Russian Embassy School of Paphos, on the basis of which the experiment took place, twice per week. In spite of the fact that both languages were acquired by the children in their early years, we claim that the bilingualism within the group being researched cannot be considered as homogeneous, differing mainly culturally depending on the way the languages were acquired. Since the phraseological units of any language always transfer some national-cultural meaning, we suggested that the children whose bilingualism was formed according to the pattern “family language – society language” demonstrate better knowledge of Russian phraseological units, and the children of the second type – “one parent – one language” pattern perform better in the knowledge of Greek phraseological units. To confirm the hypothesis we designed and carried out the experimental study which included the methods of subjective scaling and subjective definitions. Conduction of the experiment followed the comparative linguacultural analysis of Russian and Greek phraseological units the results of which are presented in the current article. For the experiment with the participation of 36 Russian-Greek bilinguals aged 10-12 we selected 80 idioms, one part of them presented non-equivalent units and the other one – phraseological units with partial semantic equivalence in the compared languages. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the received data confirmed the hypothesis of the study and demonstrated the high performance of the bilinguals of both groups to identify the meaning of unknown idioms in the context.