The phraseologisation of a specialist lexicon. A case of the phrase 'Eastern Europe'

This article undertakes a descriptive analysis of the phrase Eastern Europe (or, eastern Europe2) against a background of a variety of phraseological units with the proper name Europe obtained in a corpus search of the BNCweb. At this stage, the linguistic status of the sequence Eastern Europe as a phrase is taken for granted and accepted. The meaning of phrase, as alluded to here, conforms to one of the meanings of this grammatical term listed in Trask (1996: 208), namely: “Traditionally, and very loosely, a label applied to any string of words which someone wants to consider, regardless of its syntactic status”. However, the sequence Eastern Europe may be looked at from other vantage points than the phraseological one. This study involves not only a criss-crossing of linguistic subfields (e.g., phraseology, morphology, terminology, semantics and pragmatics) but it also encroaches upon a non-linguistic territory (i.e., international relations). Given the complexity of the phrase in question, this article will limit itself to a thorough descriptive analysis of this one sequence/unit from a maximum number and variety of angles.