Phraseological agnonymy as a cause of communicative failures

The report discusses the problem of communication adequacy related to the occurrence of communicative failures caused by the fact that contemporary native speakers of Russia are unaware of the meanings of different phraseological units (PU) actively used in the mass media. The data obtained as a result of the experiment addressing the language consciousness of native speakers demonstrate that some phraseological units have several "parallel" meanings. When occurring in speech, such discrepancy in meaning leads to communicative failures, i.e. general cultural senses of a concrete phraseological unit are interpreted in a different way, according to various ideas inhabiting the interpreter\´s language consciousness.