Idiomatic meaning of IDIOM "halcyon days" in institutional discourse: A contextual analysis

Abstract

In this paper, the authors show how the meaning of halcyon days changes in different contexts of institutional discourse revealing potential or rearranging existing semantic primitives (semes) in its semantic structure. Primary attention of the authors is focused on the question how the structural, semantic and functional information on the idiom is to be presented in a monolingual idiom dictionary. The suggested dictionary entry comprises a number of constituent parts, each providing a different type of information about the idiom presented. The constituents of an idiom dictionary entries are as follows: 1. an idiom (lemma), 2.grammatical information (number, structural type, usage information), 3. temporal markers (old or modern, with the reference to the time of appearance in the language), 4. social markers (used by some community, professionals: Naval, Aviation, University staff etc. ), 5.territorial markers (US, UK, Canada), 6. definitions 7. examples revealing implicit senses of the idiom, 8. etymology, 9. cross-references to other entries.