PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN THE OLD-TATAR LITERARY LANGUAGE OF THE 16<sup>th</sup> - 18<sup>th</sup> CENTURIES
At a certain stage of the historical development, the language environment of a particular nation is recorded in written sources. The written heritage of the 16th - 18th centuries contains information about phonetic, morphological, lexical and phraseological features of the Tatar literary language. Its rich phraseological material is of great interest to modern researchers. The article studies phraseological units and the features of their use in the Old Tatar literary language of the 16th - 18th centuries. Phraseological units are ancient layers of the language fund, transmitted from generation to generation without changes. Their origin and semantics are the focus of modern phraseology and semasiology research. Specific examples, collected from Old Tatar written sources of the 16th - 18th centuries, show that Tatar writers of these eras actively used phraseological units in their works and poets sensitively perceived their semantics. Overtime, phraseological units in different sources have remained unchanged retaining their structure, meaning or function, while some of them have undergone various changes both in form and in content.