Phraseological unit na zubakh (on the teeth) in the light of new contextual interpretations

Linguistic studies, related to the emergence and life of phraseological units, show the importance of a neological trend in their investigation, which allows you to see the fragments of the picture of the world relevant to speakers, and the variety of ways used to verbalize ideas about them. However, the meanings of neofraseologisms, recorded in dictionaries, do not always adequately reflect the real picture of their speech functions. The article considers a neological unit whose spectrum of semantic interpretations is far from being unambiguous. The contexts of the National Corps of the Russian language, illustrating the active usage of the phrase “na zubakh” (“on the teeth – gave it one’s all”), show that it has developed quite clear syntagmatic connections that speak in favor of at least two possibilities of its interpretation - with dictionaries fixating only one of the versions. A stable collocation with the verbs to pull out, to win, etc., on the one hand, and contextual supports, united by the meaning “to win, to achieve a goal," on the other, gradually form a different meaning of the idiom, very typical of sports discourse. It characterizes sport competition, excitement, manifestation of perseverance, stamina, etc. In the course of its functioning in speech, it is gradually “magnetized” by the semantics of “win”, “at any cost”, “by all means”. All this requires the need to seriously correct the modern semantics of the phraseological unit in the dictionary.