«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

m 171 n Ludmila Torlakova Conceptualizing Stupidity and Ignorance in Arabic Idioms P hraseology, or the study of phrasemes, was established not very long ago as an independent field, but scholars are devoting increasing attention to this complex subject. As has been shown to be the case with other languages, research in Arabic phraseology can contribute greatly to our knowledge and understanding of Arab culture, Arab social relations and the Arab peoples’ “primitive picture” of the world. There is no universally accepted approach to or definition of phrasemes and the subset of idioms 1 in different theoretical frameworks, but most defini- tions include three main features: 2 (1) idioms are a set of expressions consist- ing of more than one word 3 , (2) they are characterized by stability or fixed- ness, and (3) they exemplify “idiomaticity” (understood as the quality of word combinations whose meaning cannot be described as the sum of their indi- vidual elements 4 ). Since the process of creating an idiom requires combining words or, as Adam Makkai puts it, selecting existing signs in order “to start recombining them in terms of a suggestive image,” 5 idioms are formations representing a “secondary level of denomination” 6 . Despite the fact that the constituent words of an idiom are used and recombined in new senses, the 1 Though less precise, the word idiom is more readily understood and has gained prevalence in Western language studies. 2 Baranov A., Dobrovol’skij D. Aspekty teorii frazeologii. Moskva: Znak, 2008. P. 27. 3 Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics , 216b. 4 Ibid., 216b-17a. 5 Makkai A. Idiomaticity as a Reaction to L’Arbitaire du Signe in the Universal Process of Semeio-Genesis, in Cristina Cacciari and Patrizia Tabossi, eds., Idioms: Processing, Struc- ture, and Interpretation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. P. 319. 6 Veronika N. Teliia, Russkaia frazeologiia: semanticheskii, pragmaticheskii i lingvoul’tu- rologicheskii aspekty. Moscow: Iazyki Russkoi Kul’tury, 1996. P. 175.