• Lexico-Semantic and Stylistic Features of Phraseological Units with a Floral Component: A Corpus-Based Analysis

    Author Information

    Yaqub Akhundov; Mubariz
    Doctoral Student
    Nakhchivan State University
    Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

    E-mail: yaqubaxundov63@gmail.com
    ORCID: 0009-0000-7375-6448

    Keywords

    Phraseological units Floral imagery Conceptual metaphor Idiomaticity Corpus linguistics Stylistic function Cross-linguistic analysis

    Abstract

    The lexico-semantic category of phraseological units with floral components is important from a theoretical point of view, but it has not been systematically studied. This study presents a multilingual and multi-parameter analysis of a corpus consisting of 342 floral phraseological units from five languages: English, Russian, French, German, and Ukrainian. The corpus was coded according to floral component type, grammatical structure, degree of idiomaticity, semantic domain, stylistic register, and function. Inter-rater reliability was high across all coded dimensions (κ ≥ 0.77). The modal idiomaticity class was phraseological unity (47.1%), with partial metaphorical motivation grounded in the conceptual schemas LIFE IS A PLANT and PEOPLE ARE PLANTS. Five semantic domains were identified, with human character (29.0%) and life–death–transience (21.1%) being the most productive. The non-uniform distribution of idiomaticity by semantic domain was statistically significant (χ² = 18.43, p = .049), indicating that semantic domain is one of the predictors of idiomaticity degree. The five main functions—evaluation (34.5%), imagery (28.1%), euphemism (15.2%), irony (12.0%), and social marking (10.2%)—were also non-uniformly distributed across registers and idiomaticity classes (χ² = 42.17, p < .001). The cross-linguistic results demonstrate the coexistence of universal experience and culture-specific elaboration. Source domain salience emerges as a key factor in explaining idiom transparency, with implications for lexical representation theory and second-language acquisition.

    How to Cite

    Akhundov, Y. M. (2026). Lexico-Semantic and Stylistic Features of Phraseological Units with a Floral Component: A Corpus-Based Analysis. Science, Education and Innovations in the Context of Modern Problems, 9(8), 1–19.

    Publication History

    Received November 14, 2025
    Accepted May 12, 2026
    Published Online June 01, 2026

    Open Access and Licensing

    © 2026 The Author(s).

    Published by Science, Education and Innovations in the Context of Modern Problems (SEI) under the auspices of IMCRA – International Meetings and Conferences Research Association (Azerbaijan).

    This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

    CC BY 4.0 License

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