Курсовая работа: The use of common names in idiomatic expressions

· Ideologies: Leninism – after Vladimir Lenin , Maoism – after Mao Zedong. (www.wikipedia.org)

· Inventions: Braille – Louis Braille , diesel engine – Rudolph Diesel . (www.wikipedia.org)

· Mathematical theorems: Ptolemaios theorem (geometry), Atkinson’s theorem (operator theory). (www.wikipedia.org)

· Prizes, awards and medals: Nobel Prize – Albert Nobel , O. Henry Awards – O. Henry. (www.wikipedia.org)

3. Practical Chapter. The use of proper names in idioms

3.1 The methodology of the Research

The aim of the research work is to analyze the use of proper names in English idioms and to identify origins of these names. Idioms were classified into two groups: with personal names and with place names. The definitions of the collocated idioms were presented as well and they were illustrated with examples. The scope of the work is 97 idioms which were selected from the following sources:

· Longman Idioms Dictionary (1999).

· www.dictionary.com.

· www.usingenglish.com.

The distribution of all taken examples is shown in figure No. 1.

Figure No.1 Kinds of idioms

Research methods employed in the work are as follow:

· Descriptive-theoretical literary analysis provided a possibility to review numerous issues concerning features of proper nouns.

· Statistical method – was salutary for the processing of the results of the empirical part of the research.

The English language has quite a long list of idioms. Idioms with personal and place names among all the idioms are not the prevailing ones. To compare both idioms with personal and place names researched in our work we can draw a conclusion than idioms with personal names are used more frequently in the English language. In our sources we have found only 24 ones with place names and even 73 idioms with personal names, in percent style, accordingly 25 % and 75 %. For example:

· Be robbing Peter to pay Paul – to take money from one part of a system or organization that needs it and use it for another part of the system or organization, so that you deal with one difficulty but still have problems. (Longman Idiom Dictionary:1999:261). Idiom with personal names.

· New York minute – (USA) if something happens in a New York minute, it happens very fast. (www.usingenglish.com). Idiom with place name.

3.2 Idioms with personal names

We have analyzed 73 idioms with personal names and while analyzing the idiom we have noticed that they could be divided into groups according to their origins. We distinguished the following groups:

1. Names derived from mythology.

2. Names derived from religion.

3. Names based on characters of the books, films, cartoons etc.

4. Names derived from folk mythology.

5. Names of the real persons.

6. Others.

Results of this analysis are shown in figure № 2.

Figure № 2.Origin of personal names in idioms

According to the results we made conclusions that religion and mass media influence people’s language the most. Idioms with these names are quite popular and very often used in spoken language. For example, idioms based on religion characters:

1. Raise Cain – to complain a lot about something in an angry or noisy way because you are determined to get what you want (www.usingenglish.com).