A Taxonomic Approach to Structural and Semantic Dimensions in English Phraseology

Phraseological units are conventionalised multi-word expressions whose overall meaning cannot be straightforwardly derived from their individual parts. They include idioms, collocations, proverbs and other fixed expressions that are ubiquitous in English. Such units play a crucial role in language fluency, cultural expression and cognitive processing. This article aims to classify English phraseological units along two primary dimensions: structure (the syntactic form of the expression) and semantics (the transparency of meaning). We adopt a descriptive, corpus-based methodology, examining examples from the British National Corpus and authoritative idiom dictionaries (e.g. Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms) to ground our analysis. Structural categories are identified (e.g. noun phrases vs verb phrases vs full sentences) as well as semantic types (fully transparent vs semi-transparent vs opaque idioms). The proposed typology is summarized in terms analogous to nominative vs predicative vs communicative units. We also discuss how certain expressions blur category boundaries (e.g. literal vs figurative senses in context). This classification has practical implications: it can guide lexicographers in organizing idiom dictionaries, inform language teachers in grouping formulaic language, and assist computational linguists in multiword expression detection and processing. Future work may involve corpus-driven statistical modelling of phraseological regularities and the development of enriched phraseological databases for NLP applications.