Phraseological representation of eyes and ears in the American variety of English

The aim of the research is the semantic-conceptual modeling of the representation of the organs of sight and hearing by English phraseological units with the components "eye/eyes" and "ear/ears" in a comparative aspect and against the backdrop of corpus data. The article examines the semantic-conceptual models of metaphor, metonymy, and metaphtonymy underlying the indicated phraseological units, establishes the invariants of these models for both phraseological groups, performs their corpus analysis, and identifies similarities and differences in quantitative terms both between phraseological units within each group and between the groups. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, the modeling of the phraseological representation of the two most important organs for human reception of information about the world is carried out taking into account corpus data on the frequency of the phraseological units involved in this representation. This makes a significant addition to the general understanding of somatic phraseology and the specificity of the interpretation of the world expressed in it by humans. The results of the study show a typological similarity in the implementation of conceptual models in phraseological units with the components "eye/eyes" and "ear/ears." In particular, the widespread use of metaphtonymy in the material under study is explained by the same understanding of the organs of perception of information, directed from the organ to its function and from a specific situation to an abstract one. The use of corpus data confirms the significance of visual information, manifested at the phraseological level of the language system, and also reveals the absence of a direct correlation between the frequency of plural and singular forms of the somatisms "eye/eyes" and "ear/ears" in corpus concordances and in the structure of phraseological units.