THE PROBLEM OF INNER FORM IN PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

The concept of the inner form can be surveyedalso in phrases characterized by semantic stability and unity as the set phrases or phraseological units. What is characteristic of phraseological units is the fact that in most of the occurrences the literal, core meaning of these entities is what may be regarded as the inner form of the phraseological units. As generally accepted in most of the cases idioms can be semantically motivated and they can be associated to a to an identifiable logical connection as well as to transparent stated interlinguistic relations which could help us to understand the reflection of common conceptual grounds. One of the most striking traits these figurative conventional units have is that they cannot be interpreted without being addressed to a deep cultural exploitation. Extralinguistic factors should be considered so that we understand these units semantic and pragmatic features as well as the way they operate. The principal scope of this paper is to demonstrate that the study of idioms inner form, as part of exploiting idiomatic motivation, is an important linguistic issue because motivation can influence the way an idiom can be interpreted and consequently used. The exploration of the inner form is understood as a possibility to interpret the underlying mental image. Examples taken form three different Indo-European languages as mere representatives of idiomatic corpus demonstrated that the underlying lexical structure of these phraseological units on one hand and their inner form including the image component on the other are not identical. Moreover, differences in the inner form of these idioms can lead to differences in their lexicalized meanings.