Volume 11, Issue 1

This study combines a corpus-based approach and intuition-based judgements to develop a set of multiword combinations for research publications in academic journals. To obtain a representative sample, a corpus of four internal sections of 120 Applied Linguistics research articles indexed in the TCI (Thai Citation Index) database was systematically compiled and investigated. To identify n-grams which occur frequently in the corpus, a corpus-based approach was used. First, a list of 49 content-based strings, likely to be the most useful for pedagogic purposes, was derived. Based on their grammatical and semantic relationships, 3-grams were further investigated. For multiword sequences to occur frequently in the corpus, some pragmatic functionality is required which contributes to pedagogical use. Five EAP instructors were therefore invited to select the useful multiword combinations from the list of identified n-grams. A list of 289 phraseological patterns was finally created successfully. The list can provide additional evidence-based and corpus-informed instructional resources which support English teachers with the planning of lessons as well as materials design and development, particularly for advanced language courses which target scholarly writing.

This paper analyses the translations that French undergraduate students come up with when they are to deal with fixed expressions (FEs) in English that have been modified morphologically, syntactically, lexically or semantically. FEs in English are not always used in their canonical form and are often modified in the media for contextualization purposes or stylistic reasons. They can be modified by lexical substitution, lexical insertion and by lexical and semantic inversion resulting in distinct expressions with a different sense. The paper reveals the sources of mistranslation and the pedagogic means to deal with them based upon this specific type of translation exercise. Two types of FEs are taken into account: FEs in the target language sharing all or parts of the lexical constituents with those in the source language and FEs with no direct equivalent in French. The study can also have a more general impact on translation methodology as a whole: mistranslation analysis of FEs demonstrates the difficulties students have in recognizing and/or in adapting the translation of FEs according to their modification and their context. Translating FEs could therefore be used as a first methodological step in initiating students to the specific problems of translation as a whole.

The present research introduces the tool gApp , a Python-based text preprocessing system for the automatic identification and conversion of discontinuous multiword expressions (MWEs) into their continuous form in order to enhance neural machine translation (NMT). To this end, an experiment with semi-fixed verb–noun idiomatic combinations (VNICs) will be carried out in order to evaluate to what extent gApp can optimise the performance of the two main free open-source NMT systems —Google Translate and DeepL— under the challenge of MWE discontinuity in the Spanish into English directionality. In the light of our promising results, the study concludes with suggestions on how to further optimise MWE-aware NMT systems.

The study presented in this paper aims to perform a comprehensive analysis of the use of phraseological units (PUs) in contemporary Spanish according to two different levels of oral language production: (a) spontaneous informal (on the basis of conversations uttered among the contestants of the Spanish version of the reality show Big Brother ), (b) spontaneous formal (on the basis of interviews performed on Spanish radio and TV programmes). The configuration of Spanish phraseology as it is used in formal and informal spontaneous oral language production will be investigated according to four variables: frequency distribution, typological distribution, stylistic distribution, and individual distribution. It will be shown that a) the more informal the discourse context, the higher the frequency of use of PUs, b) that idioms (and not routine formulae or proverbs ) are clearly dominant in both formal and informal oral contexts, c) that there are speakers in formal discourse contexts who often utter informal PUs, d) that vulgar vs. non-vulgar PUs – and not so much informal vs. non-informal PUs – is the main disagreement between formal and informal spontaneous oral contexts, and e) that using vulgar PUs more or less frequently would be a highly individual issue.

There is a general consensus about the existence of a cognitive transfer by which we conceive time in terms of space, witnessed by the recurrence of this metaphor in many languages. We can distinguish two theoretical trends in the treatment of this conceptual metaphor: those based on universalistic apriorisms and those based on more relativistic and empirical assumptions. While the first tend to extrapolate from English, reducing this metaphor to very few basic models with a natural motivation, the second privilege Amerindian languages, with empirical data which do not fit in such speculative universals. This contrastive work on the two typologically distant languages Spanish and Chinese confirms the cross-linguistic productivity of other space-to-time associations ( reversed time , mirror time , vertical time , cyclic time ). Though our results show more similarities than differences in the overall available inventory, some specific divergences between Chinese and Spanish are also noted.

Idioms are especially complicated language units from a semantic point of view. They are motivated, expressive, ambigue, imagic and imaginistic, and contain a semantic added value. This corpus-based research on idioms shows that their meanings are not as stable as it has been presumed until now and that dictionary definitions contain many shortcomings. The aim of this article is to reveal the semantic potential of idioms in use and to explain it from a cognitive perspective. It is argued that the semantic complexity of idioms results from two aspects: (i) their ambiguity based on interaction between the literal and the lexicalized meaning, (ii) their polylexicality – the semantic derivations can occur not only on the level of the word group but also concern the individual components. As this research shows, the most important mechanisms of meaning constitution are metonymy, metaphor and metaphtonymy.

The Phraséologie française élémentaire ou Nouveaux exercices de grammaire by Hippolyte-Auguste Dupont (1833) is, to our knowledge, the only work to use the word phraseology as a synonym for “Grammar of the French language”. It represents an exception not only to the school grammars of the nineteenth century, the century of schooling in France and school grammars, but also to the phraseological precepts of Charles Bally (1909). The analysis of this work, intended for the teaching of French as a mother tongue, will allow us to highlight two innovative aspects for the time: on the one hand, a very particular meaning of the word phraseology , namely that of the study of language through ordinary syntactic sentences, and, on the other hand, the place reserved for gallicisms , considered as “particular idioms” contrary to the general rules of grammar. The study of the opposition between these two groups of constructions in both Dupont’s and Bally’s work will lead us to contrast the facts of language in the former with the facts of expression in the latter.