Volume 7, Issue 1

This paper focuses on a specific type of Multiword Expressions, particularly widespread in Italian as well as in other Romance languages: Multiword Modifiers, i.e. prepositional phrases functioning as modifiers of a noun (Multiword Adjectives) and of a verb (Multiword Adverbs). Exploiting both syntactic and semantic analysis, this paper explores the hypothesis that Multiword Modifiers are formed on the basis of regular syntactic templates, which can structure and organize the semantic information associated with words. In this perspective, after a brief presentation of Multiword Lexical Units and the class of Multiword Modifiers, the methodology and the general theoretical framework of this study will be explained. The last section is devoted to the analysis of some semantic relations frequently fulfilled by Multiword Modifiers of Italian, French and Spanish. This investigation aims at demonstrating that all Romance languages considered make a regular use of this kind of analytical resource in adjectival or adverbial function, showing similar patterns and syntactic templates.

The major task of this paper is the implementation of new emerging phraseological disciplines, such as phraseodidactics and phraseotranslation. The author discusses the attempt to specify and deploy those new disciplines. Taking into account a wide range of phraseological phenomena in all natural languages and the need to implement effective glottodidactis and translation, the development of phraseodidactics and phraseotranslation may appear to be useful and of high importance. Phraseodidactics, also known as didactics of phraseology, is a new emerging research discipline within the scope of applied linguistics. It is an interdisciplinary field with elements of phraseology, glottodidactics, as well as contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and sociolinguistics. The term phraseodidactics has a Germanic etymology (phraseodidaktik) and became present in the literature primarily through the work of German authors such as H.H.Lüger (1997, 2001) and S.Ettinger (1998). Nonetheless, the very concept of phraseodidactics and the discipline to which it relates still are not widespread. Phraseodidactics, in accordance with its objectives, examines the processes associated with the natural assimilation of collocations, idioms, proverbs and other reproducible word forms in the mother language, and, foremost, processes related to the teaching and learning of these structures in the second and subsequent languages. Idiomatic expressions are understood here as established combinations of at least two words with a reproducible character. The scope of phraseology also includes compound words and fixed collocations. In other words, the didactics of phraseology aspires to deal with everything that is associated with the most effective teaching and learning of broadly understood phraseology. On the other hand, phraseotranslation , as a specialized interdisciplinary science postulated in this text, is situated at the crossroads of phraseology, translation studies, contrastive studies and phraseodidactics. Recently there is a growing need for an efficient interlinguistic translation; the education of future translators of foreign languages develops more and more, but the problem of phraseologization in translation is still very rarely undertaken in scientific research. An effective translation implies equivalent messages in two different linguistic codes, which becomes extremely difficult in case of phraseology. The multiple-word structures entrenched in natural languages are therefore a major challenge in the process of translation and can be a prominent difficulty even for professional translators. At present, the need of the development of phraseological competences in the process of the didactics of foreign languages is obvious. The lack of an idiomatic understanding of speaker's language can cause serious distortions in the process of verbal communication. That is why each foreign language learner should aim at mastering receptive phraseological competences. When it comes to the level of the language production, what is the most important is the acquisition of such expressions that are most needed in user's idiolect. The needs within the scope of phraseological competences are much bigger in the case of foreign language teachers or translators to be, whose phraseological competences should be highly-developed not only in terms of reception, but also at the productive level. Thus, one should not avoid such needs in educational processes.

Building upon recent phraseological studies on Old High and Middle High German texts, the alliterating word pairs in the early works of Hartmann von Aue are catalogued and analyzed philologically, thus contributing to an emerging complete listing of the paired rhetorical expressions through the Early Middle High German period. The first extant courtly Arthurian romance, Hartmann's Erec, a shorter piece of his known as Diu Klage, and a handful of poems he composed are by all indications from the last decade of the twelfth century, despite later manuscript transmission. Each pair is listed, described in the context in which it appears, and compared with any extant pairs from earlier German works. What emerge are insights into the evolution of these expressions, in some cases through centuries. On the one hand, Hartmann employs alliterating expressions that date to the Old High German period, while on the other hand apparently creating new ones. As in findings in earlier texts, pairs recorded on multiple occasions are likely to have been used by other authors. Typical for medieval German texts – when compared to similar modern expressions – is the insight that there is a fair amount of variation concerning the sequence of the alliterating elements and/or the inclusion of morpho-syntactic modifiers such as pronouns, possessives, adjectives, or adverbs. Modern translations of Hartmann's works into German and English show just how varied these phrases can appear in translation. When known, later examples of the alliterating word-pairs are cited, albeit for obvious reasons only in an incomplete fashion. The long-term project is designed to continue to chart the emergence of the early German alliterating word-pairs chronologically.

In general, the majority of native or near-native speakers of a certain language can easily identify a sentence as a proverb. They are able to do this due to different structural features, among others. These specific syntactic structures appear quite frequently in proverbs and serve as a warning sign that the particular text is deviant from the surrounding discourse and is, most probably, a proverb. The so-called proverbial formulae, e.g. Better X, than Y ; When you X (you) Y ; No X, no Y etc., are considered to be one of the most easily recognizable proverbial characteristics. They often serve as basic syntactic models and lend themselves readily for the insertion of new contents (cf. Taylor 1985: 16). In his study Structural Aspects of Proverbs , Mac Coinnigh has shown that proverbs from different languages, for instance English, Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish, share the same or a very similar syntactic architecture (Mac Coinnigh 2015: 117–120). The Irish linguist, however, did not consider examples from the Bulgarian language. Therefore, one of the main aims of the present paper is to investigate which of the structural models recorded in previous paremiological works (Kuusi 1987 (1966); Röhrich and Mieder 1977; Permjakov 1979; Mieder 2006a and 2012 etc.) can be identified in traditional Bulgarian proverbs and in what frequency. Moreover, the study intends to test the widespread hypothesis that humorous proverb innovations and variations (anti-proverbs) are often created based on proverbial formulae (Litovkina 2015: 333). For the purposes of the study, two corpora of 649 proverbs and 370 anti-proverbs were analyzed. The corpora have been previously built by Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt (Hrisztova-Gotthardt 2006 and 2010b; Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Gotthardt 2011 and 2012). The qualitative analysis has shown that 14 out of the 16 structural formulae listed by Röhrich and Mieder (1977) and Mieder (2006a and 2012) can be found in Bulgarian proverbs. The most common formula was He who Xs, Ys, serving as a syntactic model for 48 different commonly used proverbs. In case of anti-proverbs, the present structural model could be clearly identified in 30 out of 370 texts. The most prominent formulae were He who Xs, Ys , X is Y and Better X than Y .

Whereas Western scholars have been studying polylexical sequences in European languages for a long time, we cannot but recognise that the investigation into Chinese phrasemes, on the other hand, still needs further development: research on idioms is limited to compiling glossaries and adopts an approach more prescriptive than descriptive, while explanations in specialised dictionaries merely give paraphrase meanings, etymology and very few usage examples. Considering the multiplicity of viewpoints and the abundance of confusing terminology that have prevailed in Chinese phraseological studies, it appears crucial to make an assessment. In this article, after a brief review of the literature in China, we will set out on bringing a new light on one type of phrasemes that is generally considered as one of the most representative in Chinese language, namely sizige chengyu  – which we will call “four-syllable idioms” or simply chengyu .

The present paper looks into the history of linguo-cultural studies of phraseology within the Russian phraseological tradition as well as highlights some key peculiarities of their present development. The discussion dwells on the most important facts that characterize the specifics in terms of which the Russian thought has evolved from the 18 th up to the 21 st centuries in the understanding of phraseologisms as culture-dependent formations. The mainstream approaches engaged in the analysis of different ways of the ‘culture – phraseology’ interaction are outlined. The paper focuses more specifically on one of such approaches. It describes the major theoretical tenets elaborated within the linguoculturological approach to phraseology – an innovative area of investigation evolved in Russia at the end of the 20 th century. Special attention is paid to the application of the linguoculturological principles of analyzing phraseologisms to the practice of dictionary-making. The specifics of representing the cultural information in “The Large Phraseological Dictionary of the Russian Language” is described in the given paper.

This paper describes the first phase of a project whose ultimate goal is the implementation of a practical tool to support the work of language learners and translators by automatically identifying multiword expressions (MWEs) and retrieving their translations for any pair of languages. The task of translating multiword expressions is viewed as a two-stage process. The first stage is the extraction of MWEs in each of the languages; the second stage is a matching procedure for the extracted MWEs in each language which proposes the translation equivalents. This project pursues the development of a knowledge-poor approach for any pair of languages which does not depend on translation resources such as dictionaries, translation memories or parallel corpora which can be time consuming to develop or difficult to acquire, being expensive or proprietary. In line with this philosophy, the methodology developed does not rely on any dictionaries or parallel corpora, nor does it use any (bilingual) grammars. The only information comes from comparable corpora, inexpensively compiled. The first proof-of-concept stage of this project covers English and Spanish and focuses on a particular subclass of MWEs: verb-noun expressions (collocations) such as take advantage , make sense , prestar atención and tener derecho . The choice of genre was determined by the fact that newswire is a widespread genre and available in different languages. An additional motivation was the fact that the methodology was developed as language independent with the objective of applying it to and testing it for different languages. The ACCURAT toolkit (Pinnis et al. 2012; Skadina et al. 2012; Su and Babych 2012a) was employed to compile automatically the comparable corpora and documents only above a specific threshold were considered for inclusion. More specifically, only pairs of English and Spanish documents with comparability score (cosine similarity) higher 0.45 were extracted. However, see section 6 which discusses experiments with different comparability scores. Statistical association measures were employed to quantify the strength of the relationship between two words and to propose that a combination of a verb and a noun above a specific threshold would be a (candidate for) multiword expression. This study focused on and compared four popular and established measures along with frequency: Log-likelihood ratio, T-Score, Log Dice and Salience. This project follows the distributional similarity premise which stipulates that translation equivalents share common words in their contexts and this applies also to multiword expressions. The Vector Space Model is traditionally used to represent words with their co-occurrences and to measure similarity. The vector representation for any word is constructed from the statistics of the occurrences of that word with other specific/context words in a corpus of texts. In this study, the word2vec method (Mikolov et al. 2013) was employed. Mikolov et al.'s method utilises patterns of word co-occurrences within a small window to predict similarities among words. Evaluation results are reported for both extracting MWEs and their automatic translation. A finding of the evaluation worth mentioning is that the size of the comparable corpora is more important for the performance of automatic translation of MWEs than the similarity between them as long as the comparable corpora used are of minimal similarity.