Abstract:
The article deals with the difficulties that arise in the course of research into historical phraseology and often result in errors in etymological analysis of phraseological units. It has been shown that these difficulties are caused by two types of factors. Firstly, the difficulties arise as a result of changes in material and spiritual culture of a particular ethnic group. Secondly, they are connected with various changes in the language system itself. In order to successfully reconstruct the basic form of a phraseological unit, as well as its meaning and motivational relations with other language items, it is necessary to take into account information obtained from research in many fields, such as linguistics, cultural studies, ethnography and ethnology. In this article, the origin of the long forgotten Ukrainian phrase в пометли седѣти (‘to be humiliated’) has been reconstructed for the first time. The phrase was used in the sixteenth century, and some of its variants were recorded later. All the stages of reconstruction are described in detail. In order to define cultural background, information about traditional Ukrainian housing, as well as sources in which archaic forms of a wedding ceremony are described have been used. The results of the analysis of different variants of this phraseme made it possible for us to reconstruct its oldest representation and to show stages of its development. Having used information from the field of anthropology, we were able to identify the semiotic status of the action named in the internal form of the phraseme; hereupon we were able to substantiate convincingly the phraseological meaning. The reconstruction of the genesis of the phraseme в пометли седѣти which has been conducted can be considered successful due to the fact that in the course of the study no contradictions have been found, and materials from different fields complemented each other.
