Vegetable Crops as Viewed by the French (Based on the Phraseology of the Modern French Language)

This article characterizes French phraseological units with the names of vegetables, observes their semantic structure and determines their potential in the linguistic world-image formation. The article notes that the range of the names of vegetables, used in the formation of French phraseological units (including argotic), is rather wide. The authors of the article list 45 core components and show that the units with them refl ect the character and the worldview of the native speakers of French.
The research shows that the French idioms with the component nominating a vegetable have become a source of figurative characteristics of different real life phenomena and they can also represent some features of human appearance;
the descent of man; their behaviour and character; psychological and emotional states; financial state; knowledge and skills; intellectual capacity / incapacity; physiological processes of a human body; sexual behaviour and sexual orientation;
style in clothes; actions and activities; death and poor quality and cheapness of things.