Computational Actualization of Idioms: Authorial Corpus-based Idiomaticity of Contemporary British Fiction

This paper attempts to investigate the computational actualization of occasional phraseological units in Sara Waters’ Fingersmith. We make use of Natural Language Processing tools, TEI applications and digital tagging of documents. Prioritized is corpus-based phraseology with a focus on types of classification of phraseological units’ transformations by Ch. Fernando. The results display that the most frequent type of phraseological units’ transformations in the corpus under research is addition (44%) which demonstrates the author’s intention to specificate the utterance, to revive the meaning of the phraseological unit, and intensify its expressiveness.