Idiomatics in everyday speech(search for methods of description)

The article considers problems of methods of description of phraseological units of Russian everyday speech arranged in the Speech corpus “One Speaker’s Day” (ORD), and suggests possible solutions to these problems. The idiom is understood quite widely as an equivalent to the notion “phraseologism”. Criteria of idiomaticity are recognized to include stability, reproducibility, and - with some reservations - compound character and possibility to replace an idiom by a word-indicator. The last one is requested (in doubtful cases) to be checked in the course of a special linguistic experiment. In addition to the more or less conventional units of this type, i. e. proverbs, sayings and other “dictionary” idioms-phraseologisms (with lexicographic fixation, including the modified and not necessarily literary units), it is proposed to enrich the user’s corpus data for further research with units, whose idiomaticity may cause doubt, such as stable constructions ( takoe oshchushchenie / vpechatlenie; s uma soshol chto li ), forms-idioms ( po idee, po barabanu, po chesnoku ), idiom-like interjections ( Bog / chort s toboj! jolki-palki, akh ty chort! ), precedent texts, including modified and in foreign languages, phraseological occasionalisms (contextual modifications of “dictionary” idioms), as well as units that can result both from conscious modification (e. g., language games) accomplished by a speaker and from speech shifts that are typical in the situation of spontaneous speech. For all these types of idioms the article suggests a special system of labels: *IdOkk, *FId, *IdKonstr, *IdMezhd, *IdPrec, *IdPrecMod and *Id/RSb. Preliminary quantitative data of idioms occurrence in “a speaker’s day” are obtained on the basis of records of the first three informants of ORD.