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"Proverbs are the wisdom of peoples" goes an Italian saying. This is perhaps an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that much of a nation's folk-philosophy gets into proverbs, along with the spice of national customs and, above all, the peculiar flavor of the nation's language and phraseology... Proverbs are generalizations of human experience, condensations of oft-repeated occurrences of the trial-and-error variety. Above all, they are the fruit of observation and inductive reasoning, two of the great faculties of the human mind... A generalization... caught on, became popular, and was passed from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation.

Ultimately it became an integral part of the group's folklore, and was repeated whenever the situation it described recurred. Every proverb tells a story and teaches a lesson.

This lengthy discussion of the nature of the proverb by Pei reads almost as an attempt of summarizing the common understanding of proverbs. Many of the 55 definitions stated above are similar to Pei's points, and it is amazing to notice how congrous these definitions are to those defining attempts printed in magazines and newspapers. There certainly is much agreement in the non-scholarly world of what a proverb is even if scholars seem to be unable to agree on a reasonable definition at all.

A proverb is by definition a popular maxim. Proverbs are among the most ancient literary forms, and among the most universal. Enough if it [the proverb] holds its measure of truth. Proverbs are anonymous wisdom-literature of the common man in ages past.34 Matti Kuusi once defined proverbs simply as "monumenta humana," and this is exactly what they are to the general population. Our survey of 55 non-academic definitions has shown that proverbs are thought to express human wisdom and basic truths in a short sentence. Popular articles in magazines and newspapers fend to share this view of the proverb. Altogether proverbs are still seen as useful generalizations about life, even if at times their value of appropriateness in certain situations might be questioned. We can poke fun at proverbs, we can ridicule them or we can parody them, but eventually we are all governed by their insights to some degree. Proverbs and their wisdom confront us' daily, and modern people seem to have a clear idea of what proverbs are, what they express and what they can do for us. Proverb scholars would do well to pay more attention to the present use of proverbs while obviously also continuing to tackle the frustrating question of whether a universal proverb definition can be found. But in their enduring search for such an erudite definition, they can take solace in the fact that the people using proverbs do know in their minds what makes a good proverb - an incommunicable quality tells them that a short and repeated statement of wisdom, truth and experience must be a proverb.

Comparing the three approaches discussed above (semantic, functional, and contextual) we have ample ground to conclude that have very much in common as the main criteria of phraseological units appear to be essentially the same, i.e. stability and idiomaticity or lack of motivation. It should be noted however that these criteria as elaborated in the three approaches are sufficient mainly to single out extreme cases: highly idiomatic non-variable and free (or variable) word-groups.

The main features of this new approach which is now more or less universally accepted by Soviet linguists are as follows:35

Phraseology is regarded as a self-contained branch of linguistics and not as a part of lexicology. Phraseology deals with a phraseological subsystem of language and not with isolated phraseological units.

14. Phraseology is concerned with all types of set expressions.

15. Set expressions are divided into three classes: phraseological units (e.g. red tape, mare's nest, etc.), phraseomatic units (e.g. win a victory, launch a campaign, etc.) and borderline cases belonging to the mixed class. The main distinction between the first and the second classes is semantic: phraseological units have fully or partially transferred meanings while components of phraseomatic units are used in their literal meanings.

Phraseological and phraseomatic units are not regarded as word-equivalents but some of them are treated as word correlates. Phraseological and phraseomatic units are set expressions and their phraseological stability distinguishes them from free phrases and compound words.

Phraseological and phraseomatic units are made up of words of different degree of wordness depending on the type of set expressions they are used in. (cf. e.g. small hours and red tape). Their structural separateness, an important factor of their stability, distinguishes them from compound words. CONCLUSION The vocabulary of a language is enriched not only by words but also by phraseological units. Phraseological units are word-groups that cannot be made in the process of speech, they exist in the language as ready-made units.

They are compiled in special dictionaries. The same as words phraseological units express a single notion and are used in a sentence as one part of it. American and British lexicographers call such units «idioms». We can mention such dictionaries as: L.Smith «Words and Idioms»36, V.Collins «А Book of English Idioms»37 etc In these dictionaries we can find words, peculiar in their

semantics (idiomatic), side by side with word-groups and

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