Medieval measuratives in French phraseological units as the manifestations of historical memory

The paper presents the study of modern French phraseological units that contain nominations of medieval measurements of length and weight (measuratives) and also the description of their potential as translators of historical memory in phraseology.
The research is aimed at the identifi cation of the repertoire of medieval measuratives which can be used to form French phraseological units, and at the defining the information of paramount cultural and historical signifi cance, the
information which is recorded in the similar phraseological units of the language. Any phraseological unit in the whole system of a language is believed to be an emic (ideal) unit. Concurrently, it can be kept in the ethnic and language consciousness for a long time no matter in which form it might be actualised in speech.
The authors draw the conclusion that the meaning of medieval measuratives in modern French phraseology has overcome certain changes, i.e. they lost the meaning of specifi c measures and now represent large or small quantity / weight / length / distance.
The mechanism of historical memory of a speaking ethnos keeps functioning, which can’t but lead to preserving the old forms of measuratives in the structure of phraseological units and to archiving the lexical units that are no longer used in modern language.