Hyperbole and litotes as a way of semantic metamorphosis in the sphere of phrase formation

The article deals with the phraseological units of the Russian language structured along the model associated with hyperbole and litotes. The purpose of the research is to study the tropes as a way of forming phraseological units in the contemporary Russian language; to analyze semantic metamorphosis in the sphere of hyperbole units; and to describe semantic properties of antonymically related phraseological units. The research material was collected by continuous sampling from phraseological dictionaries. The conducted language analysis suggests that the corpus of phraseological units that intentionally exaggerate or underestimate reality is quite extensive and rather diverse, both structurally and semantically. The study of such bright language and speech units was conducted with the help of the systemic structural method, the comparative method, and in some cases - certain methods and techniques of linguistic and cultural analysis. The complex of the applied methods and techniques enabled us to show the versatility and complexity of the studied material and draw a number of conclusions. The results of the research show that phraseological units are built from lexemes - the equivalents of extremely large or extremely small objects, actions, phenomena, etc. Phraseological units based on hyperbole and litotes help us to establish certain benchmarks in the worldview of native speakers and mark the stereotypes of their thinking and perception: what they consider large or small, significant or insignificant. The use of hyperbole units is conditioned by the communicative and pragmatic tasks of a speaker or writer: phraseological units that correlate semantically with hyperbole or litotes enable not only giving a particular emotional or expressive coloring to a statement, but also giving assessments.