Volume 13, Issue 1

This article offers a preliminary overview of dialect phraseography, showing that it is still a relatively new field of study. However, as far as Genoese-Italian phraseography is concerned, significant developments have been made in recent years as a result of the GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2 projects. The two projects (P31321 and P 33303-G) have been financed by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and led by E. Autelli. Many thanks to Christina Scharf and Anne Freckleton for proofreading this article. The second part of this article focuses on sample sentences found in dialect dictionaries, while the third part will briefly explain the GEPHRAS2 project. This will be followed by a proposal as to how to create sample sentences for dialect phraseological dictionaries according to the criteria chosen for GEPHRAS2 , and how to analyse ancient and modern phrasemes. It will be shown that one cannot always rely on corpora in order to document sample sentences in dictionaries because, for some dialects, open access corpus is not always available. It will also be seen that, in the preparation of sample sentences, it is essential to establish a set of criteria in order to guarantee readability and authenticity, and to offer concrete help to dictionary users.

This article aims at presenting a lexicographical proposal focused on Spanish expressions that are made up of a verb and an adverbial idiom (e.g. dormir a pierna suelta , estar hasta los pelos , luchar/defender a brazo partido, reír a mandíbula batiente and ver/mirar con buenos ojos ). These polilexical units have been defined by several linguists as complex collocations (e.g. Barrios Rodríguez 2015; García-Page Sánchez 2004, 2013; Koike 2001, 2005; Penadés Martínez 2017). Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as dictionaries of idioms, have managed these units in different ways. In fact, they are sometimes labelled as verbal idioms, and other times as adverbial ones. Considering these facts, this paper proposes a taxonomy for the Diccionario fraseológico multilingüe digital ( DFMD ), a digital multilingual dictionary of idioms currently being compiled at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Our proposal is based on the comparison between the lexicographical data currently available on the one hand, and the information that can be obtained from the academic corpus CORPES XXI on the other. As a result of this comparison, we identify four classes of possible relations between adverbial idioms and verbs that precede them. For each of these relationships, we suggest an ad hoc lemmatization, the purpose of which is to encourage the development of users’ phraseological competence by providing them with clear, reliable and easy-to-use information. As a result, in the following sections we introduce, firstly, the state of the art concerning complex collocations (Section 1) and, secondly, the corpus collected and the parameters adopted for its selection and analysis (Section 2). Later, we describe our lexicographical proposal and its application to the DFMD by offering some examples of records for the Spanish-Italian / Italian-Spanish repertoire (Section 3). Finally, we infer some conclusions and food for thought for future investigations (Section 4).

A corpus-based analysis of specialised phraseology can shed light on the role of phrasal context in terminology. This contribution describes the behaviour of constituents of simple and complex specialised collocations in technical texts and the way in which these are distributed in different contexts ranging from the immediate surroundings of a node to the inclusion of a much larger portion of text. The contextual behaviour of specialised collocations is exemplified by English and Italian terms in the domain of photovoltaic technology. This contribution aims to identify and classify specialised collocations along their formation modalities and contexts, as well as to discuss the impact of these phenomena on their representation in LSP lexicographic resources. Issues and options concerning the extraction of collocations and contexts are also addressed.

Lexical bundles are highly frequent and functionally significant in written academic discourse. Many studies have explored lexical bundles through a disciplinary lens, but their findings are not typically incorporated into published L2 teaching-learning materials. As a result, there are a number of challenges facing teachers who want to include a focus on disciplinary lexical bundles in their academic writing instruction at tertiary level. This paper describes a method for deriving a functional list of disciplinary lexical bundles from a corpus of academic writing, and then discusses the results quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings suggest that a small number of bundles ( n =47) occur across genres, levels and institutions in the academic writing of the Arts and Humanities disciplines. Finally, a series of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) resources are presented, including a tool for finding the bundles in academic texts. The functional list and resources will be of interest to those involved in the teaching-learning of academic writing in the Arts and Humanities disciplines.

Proverbs are notoriously hard to define, and various approaches to this problem are currently in use in the field of paremiology. The discussion in this paper develops a marker-based proverb definition based on linguistic criteria which is suitable for proverb research in linguistic paremiology. The basis of this definition is empirically supported by the results of an experiment with invented German proverbs containing different types of proverbial markers built on the design described in Arora (1984). The results of the experiment show the importance of proverbial markers for the successful identification of proverbs in discourse, thus allowing the establishment of a first hierarchy of proverbial markers. On a methodological level, the experimental design introduced provides insights into proverb structure and the nature of proverbiality. Furthermore, the results underline the fact that proverbial markers are not optional, but should be an essential aspect of every linguistic proverb definition.

Within the field of phraseology, phrasemes are recognized as being semantically more complex than single words (Burger 2007: 79). The polysemy and ambiguity of idioms, their semantic approximation and the added value, their wide meaning, and their context-dependence has led many researchers to acknowledge that preparing “a range of semems” from the wider meaning of the idiomatic units in which they are used is problematic (Fleischer 1997: 168). This belief has marginalized the debate about the boundaries between meanings and their variants. In linguistics, studies based on language use and cognitive approaches are playing an increasingly important role, and there has been a “corpus revolution” in phraseography. This means that lexical ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness have gained greater relevance. In phraseology, developing the capture and description of idiomatic meaning cannot be achieved without a theoretical discussion of “the wide meaning”. The aim of this study is to explore a selection of the problems facing linguists when they try to capture meaning and describe phrasemes from a cognitive perspective. The study will focus on questions of ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness, and their impact on the theory and practice of phraseology and phraseography.

This contribution deals with idioms in vernacular Syrian Arabic, focusing on the verbal component, as well as their semantic and grammatical particularities. The corpus of 151 idioms is extracted from seven popular TV series, 91 of these are presented in the paper along with a literal and idiomatic translation. The idiomatic meaning of the most frequently attested verbs is discussed first. This is followed by a grammatical discussion regarding word order, verbal inflection, morphological variation and lexical variation. The paper demonstrates the scarcity of idioms in some of the most important sources of Syrian Arabic. It further reveals grammatical parallels with idioms in other Arabic varieties, as well as in Western languages. The findings provide the field with new data, and will lead to a better understanding of both Arabic idioms in general, and Syrian Arabic in particular.