Structural and semantic peculiarities of baseball-related terminological phrseological units in modern English

The article investigates a special class of supra-word units, terminologisms, which are characterized by the simultaneous presence of terminological and phraseological meanings, each of which can be realized either in a special, terminological context or in a literary fiction or journalistic context. The authors provide data on studies devoted to terminologisms and propose a new term to nominate units formed on the basis of sports terms: sportisms. Based on 29 phraseological units formed on the basis of baseball terms, the structural and semantic features peculiar of the described class of units are identified. The relevance of the work is related to the trend towards the development of terms with metaphorical meanings in modern English, which once again proves the possibility of the development of a second, phraseological meaning in some sports terms. Functional analysis shows that the terminological phraseological units under study can be found in various types of discourse, i.e., they are characterized by transterminologization.

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