Specifics of phraseological units functioning in English public discourse on the material of Youtube platform

Abstract

Discourse is one of the most understudied area in linguistics. It has a specific
meaning and function in various areas of science, in linguistics there are three models of
correlation in discourse and text. The main research problem of discourse is the absence of
strict borders between different types of discourse. We single out public discourse as one
of the broadest types of discourse the main feature of it is the coverage of the audience.
Considering this feature of the public discourse we took the material of study from the
biggest video hosting platform Youtube. Phraseological units are sophisticated lexical
components of any language that have semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic functions. This
article is an attempt to make a quantitative analysis of phraseological units that belong to
different stylistic layers (formal and informal) and the way they are used in public
discourse. Quantitative analysis allowed researchers to describe a distribution of
phraseological units in topical areas.