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A. One-summit units, which have one meaningful
constituent (e. g. to give up, to make out, to pull out, to be tired, to
be surprised);
B. Two-summit and multi-summit units which have two
or more meaningful constituents (e. g. black art, first night,
common sense, to fish in troubled waters).
Within each of these large groups the phraseological units
are classified according to the category of parts of speech of the
summit constituent. So, one-summit units are subdivided into: a)
verbal-adverbial units equivalent to verbs in which the semantic
and the grammatical centers coincide in the first constituent (e. g.
to give up); b) units equivalent to verbs which have their semantic
centre in the second constituent and their grammatical centre in the
first (e. g. to be tired); c) prepositional-substantive units equivalent
either to adverbs or to copulas and having their semantic centre in
the substantive constituent and no grammatical centre (e. g. by
heart, by means of).
Two-summit and multi-summit phraseological units are
classified into:
a) attributive-substantive two-summit units equivalent to
nouns (e. g. black art);
b) verbal-substantive two-summit units equivalent to verbs
(e. g. to take the floor),
c) phraseological repetitions equivalent to adverbs (e. g. now
or never);
d) adverbial multi-summit units (e. g. every other day через).
Professor Smirnitsky also distinguishes proper
phraseological units which, in his classification system, are units
with non-figurative meanings, and idioms, that is, units with
transferred meanings based on a metaphor.
Professor A.V. Kunin, the leading Russian authority on
English phraseology, pointed out certain inconsistencies in this
classification system. First of all, the subdivision into
phraseological units (as non-idiomatic units) and idioms

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