Grammatical Functions of One Biblical Idiom

Abstract

The biblical idiom (a/the) Good Samaritan is one of the most common set phrases that are used in contemporary English, including its standard variants. Over 800 contexts with this phraseological unit were found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COСA) alone. In the Bible, this phrase is not an idiom since its components show no signs of semantic transfer and each word is used in its original meaning: this is a parable about a good Samaritan who, upon seeing an emaciated person covered in wounds and scabs, hurries to help him. The object of research in this paper is the specific use of the biblical idiom (a/the) Good Samaritan in contemporary English, e.g. in the sentences presented on the websites of national corpora of contemporary English, including its standard variants. In this article, a sample from COCA was studied. The subject of research is the percentage of various grammatical functions performed by this biblical idiom in a sentence, since function is a focus of a linguist’s attention both structurally and cognitively. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the biblical idiom (a/the) Good Samaritan has not been subject to a detailed linguistic analysis in terms of its grammatical functions in a sentence.