Idioms arise as the immediate consequence of language’s immanent heterogeneity and homomorphism entailing interpretative ambiguity

The idea of corpus approach has been engendered and developed in connection with “nidal” method in compiling vocabularies with the great nests that opposed to those of encyclopedic type. The “nidal” method has been conceived as a counterpart to encyclopedic dictionaries with their pretensions to find the final answers and definitions with the ensuing allocation of lexical units in the constant positions predestined with the compiler’s ambitions. It was J. Grimm who gave the first paragon of such approach proclaiming the impossibility of encyclopedic attempts to give exhaustive representation of lexical fund in all its manifold interpretations³³. It is remarkable that it is with the connection to the nidal method the stress was laid upon the composed lexical units and the formation of new words that would not be restricted with the preexistent derivative models³⁴.

Corpus’ methods continue immediately taxonomic (or nesting) methods in applying them to confined particular dialects as the separate regions of language’s space. The notion of corpus emerges as the counterpart of the notion of taxonomic class or etymological nest. The common base for the development of the both methods are to be found in morphology that presumes the exploration and examination of theoretical opportunities as the premise for the study of their revelations in reality. The virtual world is conceived as the pre-existent condition for the real world. Respectively there are presupposed the latent genotypes of the phenomena to be explored together with the phenotypes or the immediately observable facts. This fundamental division into the latent and the manifested determines both taxonomy and corpus approach. Each classificatory (taxonomic) scheme presumes such division into genotypes (theoretical opportunities) that determine classes (sets) and phenotypes represented with the elements of these sets. Obviously such scheme reproduces the division into relatively concrete objects (elements) and their abstract properties or attributes (which determine classes). Such dialectics of abstraction proper to morphology is connected also with the division of totality and particularity: each form necessarily involves the delimitation and separation of some particular from the total. Morphology as the foundation of both taxonomy and corpus’ approach presume the previous determination of possibilities for such subdivision of language’s space into subspaces. It goes about the construction of possible morphemic genotypes determining their reflection in phenotypes in taxonomy. Accordingly corpus approach by no means represents attested facts only: there are “ghost words” among attested phenotypes and vice versa the most important elements can be absent among the observable sources. Then the taxonomic morphological possibilities of language must be taken into account and referred to delimited particular subspace when corpus methods are to be used. These possibilities preview also the emergence of “charades” (together with “ghost-words” and onomatopoetic morphemes secondarily comprehended as the sound imitations). Such were for instance the futurists’ attempts of building “unintelligible language” («заумный язык»). Corpus approach counts with such possibilities and isn’t restricted with the described factual data only. In its turn all the theoretically built genotypes cover the total space of language’s possibilities so that the entirety of system is determined where each element presupposes all others. There are thus no separate genotypes that would be reflected in separate phenotypes. This integrity is proper for the corpus as well: each separate sentence represents the corpus it belongs to. One ought to say of the whole system of genotypes divided into subspaces where attested phenotypes are to find their places.

To exemplify the outlined problematic core it would be appropriate to involve the problem of ideography that immediately concerns the researches of artistic texts and reveals essential controversies. The existent dictionaries of proverbs or idioms are of purely semantic, ideographic destination. Meanwhile it is already any versified text where phonological conditions take a primordial place in determining the semantic shifts. Consequently the “pure” contents can’t be represented adequately if isolated from the vivid “flesh” of words even in the simplest cases of inner rhyme. Within each idiolect a specific net of phonological devices arises that determine a sign’s motivation so that one could by no means ignore the peculiar ways of sense’s assignment elaborated for the chosen corps of texts of this particular idiolect.

An essential deficiency of the vocabularies of poetic idioms lies in the inconsistency of the stuff with the adopted rigid classificatory schemes. For example the quoted lines by N. M. Karamzin «Чувствительной душе не сродно ль изменяться? / Она мягка как воск, как зеркало, ясна» are divided into two separate utterances that have been classified into different types of derivation (the so called paradigms): 1) soul as a thing (soul → mirror); 2) soul as substance (soul → wax). It is too obvious that such a preparation of the text subdues the genuine poetic images to artificially concocted classes that are fully inadequate to their contents. It is not the soul as such that has been mentioned in the poetry but its peculiarities, namely its sensitivity and mutability that is substantiated with the necessity to unite the objects of comparison (mirror + wax). These peculiarities in their turn are compared not to mirror or beeswax as such but to those properties of them that had not even been mentioned by the poet though meant as something self-evident: the wax’s faculty to retain vestiges as the result of pressure and the changeability of a mirrored thing together with its movements. As to the soul itself, it can be also stiff and stubborn and not sensitive, quite different from wax, as well as frozen and hard and not changeable in opposite to mirror, so that the suggested “paradigms” turn out to become fictive: it would be more correctly to deal with such semantic shifts as (a soul’s mutability → a mirror’s reflection) and (a soul’s sensitivity → wax’s pliability). Another example is demonstrated in V.Petrov’s appeal to his wife: «Ты, зеркало, меня сугубяще ответом / Я в сердце зрюсь твоем, любовию согретом, / И в детях зрюсь моих; / Ты зришися во мне, и зришься также в них». It is only one “paradigm” that issues from these lines in the vocabulary: “woman as thing” (the derivation [woman → mirror]). Meanwhile it goes also about the wife’s reflection in the author’s face not to mention their mutual reflection in their children! Beside these deficiencies the mirror here is not an indifferent and inanimate “thing”, it is “heated with love” and awaits responses! All these senses of idioms are excluded from consideration in the vocabulary.

In another vocabulary of idioms the idea has been suggested that not separate tropes but periphrastic descriptions would be taken into consideration and subdued to several different “paradigms” when these circumlocutions contain various types of semantic shift. Thus a serious step towards multidimensional classification of idioms has been made³⁵. The deficiencies of reducing the contents and its deformation take place within this approach as well despite such ameliorative efforts: for instance the line by A. S. Pushkin «Когда прибегнем мы под знамя / Благоразумной тишины» gives grounds for the singular “paradigm” of derivation (silence → quietude). At the same time the “reasonable” nature of this silence remains ignored as well as the motif of its “banner” that the lyrical hero adopts and “stands by”. So the adequacy and satisfactory completeness of the description of idioms fails in this case too.

The negative experience of the attempts to build ideographic vocabularies which would cover the peculiarities of ethnic idioms leads to a conclusion that there are some cardinal faults in the very idea of compiling the lexical stuff without its preliminary etymological preparation. Meanwhile a pure ideographic approach proves to be marked with numerous contradictions. This approach has been represented in the works of W. von Wartburg and R. Hallig for the preliminary preparation of the lexicological stuff while compiling material for the French etymological dictionary in the 50-s of the XX-th century, and it was subjected to strong criticism by F. Dornseif who had revealed the lack of its elasticity. The Hallig - Wartburg’s system presupposes the existence of all the possible semantic fields and divides them into three sections – those belonging to world, to human being and to their interconnections. In its turn, for example, the section “World” includes such subsections as sky, land, water, soil and the so called “three realms of nature” - that is fossils, plants and animals [Казанскене, 1986].

Such a division itself provokes already a question whether it would be valid to ignore the experience of an archaic philosophy of nature where the four elements were known, and whether the concept of “fossils” can cover all the manifoldness of the solid corpuscles. Another section dedicated to the human being seems to underestimate the ancient forms of the division of labor. Besides, the forms of social organization are treated twice – for instance, as the forms of community (family, kinship) and of a settlement (city, village). The same reduplication takes place in regard of the living world where plants and animals are divided into wild and domesticated thus rejecting the original idea of the realms of nature itself. Branches of craftsmanship are referred to societal subsections, while the relations of property are connected to the forms of occupation – namely to those of building industry. The third section concerns the so called abstract notions (shape, movement, space, time, order, quantity) despite the well known fact that etymologically they are a kind of derivatives and can’t be regarded separately without reference to their origin. For instance, the English proverb, “time and tide wait for no man” is by no means the proverb only – it represents also a very luckily coined figura etymologica!.

The principal faults of such an approach are evident. First of all striving at the exhausting description of semantic fields the authors have created numerous artificial subdivisions of classification that turn out to be vacant when such a scheme is filled with lexical material. Thus a bulk of classificatory subsections proves to be superfluous. In its turn each lexical unit is split into semantic elements that are inserted into different classes of a classificatory scheme. In other words it is reduced to a mass of homonyms that have to substitute it while such a unit is vanishing. Then unanswerable questions arise, how to collect such dispersed homonyms again with the aim of describing these units and whether it is possible to exhaust the semantic contents with such a procedure of reduction. Besides, each classificatory scheme chosen by the investigators reflects their preferences and is to be regarded as a momentary hypostasis of the continuous language development, other periods being ignored and omitted. A separate and artificially isolated from the continuous flow of history classificatory scheme is presented as an inerrable way of distributing the lexical stuff. The attempts of compiling such species of thesaurus where the etymology would be refused failed as the pure ideographical approach revealed itself as inapt of coping with the polysemy. Instead of tracing derivative processes and transitions partisans of such an approach split units with multiple senses in a set of homonyms so that they lose their organic unity.

It is known that the attempts failed to build purely ideographic thesauri where etymology would be ignored. This negative experience has lead to pessimistic conclusion as to the opportunities of abstract descriptions of lexical stuff because the very procedure of dissociation of an element of semantic field into a bunch of homonyms becomes impracticable³⁶. Besides, it has been demonstrated the essential discrepancy between the borders of semantic fields in dictionaries and in real texts so that the conclusion is obtained as the necessity of taking into account the patterns of etymological nests³⁷.

A well known attempt to combine ideography with etymology has been undertaken by C.Buck in his synonymous dictionary: nevertheless, as the author himself warns in the preface, “there will be much that is frankly arbitrary” [Buck, 1949, p. XII]. Etymological nests are here torn asunder under the prescriptions of artificial ideographic scheme in the same way as at his predecessors, the only difference consisting in a comparatively richer stuff due to the elements of these nests. For example, to demonstrate the idea “desire” (16.62 according to ideographic scheme) German. begehren is cited, but it lacks its etymological cognate Gier “avidity”; the idea “think” (17.14) is represented with the French penser, but Latin. pendo is ignored, the French word being just its etymological reflection, similarly for “bitter” (15.37) German. beissen (English. bite) is ignored, from here the word in question is derived. Such contradictions are even worse when it goes about etymologically doubtful words. Let us cite as an example Chech kouzlo “magic”: if it seems to be reduced to root *kongos “twist” in Indo-European perspective and thus to be included in the group of Lithuanian kangas “loom” or Greek  “eel” [Mann, 1987, article *kongos], Holub and Kopecny suspected here a loan word from German Gaukel and Machek proposed as the source *kudes(l)o thus approaching it to kudesiti (кудесник) and suggesting to reduce it to delo. Respectively, depending upon each solution this etymon would be torn and included in different semantic fields.

Especially doubtful were the attempts of building a kind of ideography in the compilation of motif indices for tales, proverbs and narrative genres of folklore. For instance in paremiology a classificatory scheme has been suggested that was founded on the features of motivation and derivation of the transferred meaning³⁸. Respectively, general sense was classified according to a pure deductive scheme³⁹. Although the author has admitted the artificiality of such an approach and has noticed that it is only attributive space where the approach could be applicable⁴⁰, this concession has become only the pretext for avoiding such a complication in the utopian task of the formation of universal attributive space⁴¹. The deficiency of such an approach is too obvious: for instance, the proverb “як кота не кидай, він все’дно на ноги стане” (one can throw a cat in various way but it will stand up on legs) must be included in the class “constant - variable” and to mean “each thing always preserves its peculiarities” [Пермяков с. 136]. In such a way one excludes beforehand all other modes of interpretation, from a usual observation of animal behavior till the expression of the skill. Such a deductive Utopia had already become the subject of discussion in the journal of the International paremiological society “Proverbium” in 1975 when it was sharply criticised by A. Krikmann [Krikmann, 1975] who stressed that each proverb could become a set of homonyms and be doubled in different segments of classificatory scheme. He argued that one cannot invent classificatory schemes a priori without bearing in mind the realities of the stuff of researches⁴². It has already been noticed that due to the existence of at least a pair of different attributes compared in a proverb the difficulties of its classificatory identification arise⁴³. Similar difficulties of classification with the beforehand selected deductive schemes were admitted at the attempts of applying them to V.I.Dahl’s collection⁴⁴.

It is obvious that one encounters here the same difficulties that are present in the attempts of building ideographic dictionaries where a lexeme splits in a set of homonyms thus losing both its integrity and the opportunity to restore it, and the description of such split homonyms, in its turn, is not sufficient to differ them reliably one from another. The same difficulties were encountered also by V.L.Klaus who had suggested a classificatory scheme for incantations that was based on the presumption of a dualistic nature of such a discourse and as a consequence of the antithetical character of the samples of this genre that would create pairs of antonyms⁴⁵. In broader sense such assumption has been taken in the researches of proverbs where the interplay of negations is supposed to entail the possible alternative statements that would accompany each proverbial utterance⁴⁶.

Meanwhile it has turned out that such opportunity is not present in every case⁴⁷ so that one needs a conjecture as to the lack of the complete set of texts to explain it. The conclusion about the necessity of the methods of etymological reconstruction for restoring such a set follows from this conjecture. One encounters here the general problem of transforming artificial classificatory scheme in natural classification. One deals here with the elements of two levels, that is with the elements themselves and the classes as the theoretical fictions bearing always the risk of producing new fictions.

The similar difficulties have been found in studying ballads. A very sharp criticism against the abstract classification of plots has been expressed with the connection of balladry by Yu. I. Smirnov. Such classificatory scholasticism is reduced to common procedures of the notions’ division and definition while the real task of the affiliation of textual entities to the respective classes is in no way to be restricted with such reduction. The usual scholastic approach ignores and distorts real affiliation of texts with imposing artificial schemes upon them⁴⁸. To remove arbitrariness & artificiality a natural classification has been suggested where in particular the presence or absence of certain attributes associated with respective motifs as well as the combinations of motifs within a plot were taken into account. The unifying principle here has become the temporality and variability of folklore text⁴⁹. For instance ballads comprise the motifs of the transformation into a tree (as the result of incantation), the motifs of water in connection with the murder of illegal child, the curses of mother leaving her child. They combine in different positions changing their purports, therefore one needs a dynamic semantic net to describe them.

The defaults of ideography (and Hallig-Wartburg’s system) are of the same nature as those of N.Chomsky’s generative approach that ignored the ontogenetic prerequisites of the “logocentric” development of human soul: it presupposed the innate character of lingual faculties while in reality one needs at least first five years of life to develop them. In contrast to such a static viewpoint Trier’s ergological method returns to an old idea coined by Karl Vossler who treated etymology as a precondition of stylistic stratification. To describe such a stratification one should proceed not from the aforethought schemes premeditatedly elaborated at a higher level of abstraction but from the lower level of etymological reality itself. This method demands respectively not to distribute etymons in the void cellules of a scheme delineated from above but to unite them in rows of synonyms and semantic derivations issuing from their low material. In its turn an evident stylistic multitude of culture’s word stock that attracted Vossler’s attention can be explained through these derivative lines knotted in semantic fields.

The method of the so called glottochronology presupposes the existence of a list of notions that are obligatorily present in each language. Such lists give us an opportunity to return to the ancient ideas of synonymous series known from the tradition of Sanskrit teaching. From this point of view it becomes evident that such series overlap with etymological nests. Meanwhile the allocation of a root within the semantic field can by no means be regarded as a constant and steady: it is due to such overlapping that this field acquires the image of a flux changeable with the time. The last statement had been elaborated and demonstrated by J.Trier who called it the “ergological” principle of semantic development. To exemplify this principle one may refer to the correspondence between German Gemeinde (“community”) and Latin munio “to build”, murus “wall”, moenia “town walls” where the term of building occupation transforms into that of a societal sphere [Trier, 11]. In this principle synonymy and etymology show the abovementioned overlapping – or, «Verknotungen der Herkunftsstränge» (the knot of the strings of past), as Trier has put it [Trier, 16]. Thus it is the dynamic aspect of semantic fields that should attract our attention. Semantic fields are to be regarded as provisional and transitory places of meaning derivative processes rather than a kind of distributional net. It is the processes of semantic transition that is of primordial importance for our aim and not that of distribution of lexemes among the fields. In other words the historical development of semantic meanings is to be studied as reflected in the formation of semantic derivatives that always reveals diachronic aspects. Obviously from such a viewpoint semantic fields don’t create any hierarchy, vice versa, they resemble the chain structure that are engirdling the body of language.

The described problems attest the necessity of taking into account the discussed properties of poetic idiolect as the peculiar subsystem of language. Codification turns out to become the interpretative problem of textual self-description.