Teaching and Learning Phraseology in the XXI Century Phraseologie Lehren und Lernen im 21. Jahrhundert

List of Contributors

Introduction. Phraseology: what lies ahead

Since Charles Bally published his Traité de stylistique français in 1909 much has been done in the wide phraseological field to provide theories, descriptions, applications and classifications of multiword units. The turning point arrived when phraseology became regarded and established as a discipline (Corpas Pastor, 2001), which was supported by the numerous national and international conferences and the proliferation of books and articles published about phraseological matters. However, another crucial moment in its history has been the arrival of Cognitive linguistics, Construction Grammar and corpus linguistics. Up to this moment linguistic frameworks had tried to describe language and in doing so, they identified two separate areas: lexis and grammar. In this context, unsurprisingly phraseology encountered obstacles to finding a place and its units were laid aside as a special group of expressions which were difficult to explain, to describe, to classify and consequently, difficult to teach and translate. However Cognitive linguistics opened up new perspectives. Langacker’s definition (1987) of the essence of language, which does not necessarily correspond to single words but to symbolic units, welcomed all types of linguistic combinations, from morphemes to grammatical structures, therefore, embracing phraseologisms. Closely related to Cognitive linguistics due to its common theoretical foundations is Construction Grammar, which also displays close links with the study of phraseology. Thanks to the features which describe the central unit of language in Cognitive linguistics and Construction Grammar, being symbolic units and constructions respectively, in the linguistic description phraseology leaves its marginal status behind.

Another paradigm, this time one of a methodological nature, which is especially relevant for the study of phraseological units (PUs) and which offers new mechanisms and ways of investigation, is corpus linguistics. The importance of its procedures is such that authors such as Gries (2008) consider corpus linguistics as the method most frequently used in phraseological research. All these linguistic theories and methods are very much responsible for the important advances that phraseology has undergone in the last forty years helping to build a strong theory of phraseology which constitutes the grounds of applied phraseology. Two of the areas which have received a great deal of attention within ←9 | 10→applied phraseology are phraseodidactics and phraseotranslation, the fields dealt with in this volume. Although for all phraseologists, PUs should be at the heart of language teaching, the reality of phraseodidactics in the classroom is not so optimistic (Granger and Meunier, 2008). A similar picture can be drawn for phraseotranslation clearly demonstrating that there is still work to be done and shared. This is the motivation and impulse behind the teaching innovation group at the University of Murcia, PhraseoTic, which has worked on several projects to develop materials and tools aimed at the improvement of the educational and translation spheres of phraseology. This volume is one of the results of that work and attempts to shed some light in the fields of phraseodidactics and phraseotranslation. As it deals with the latest innovations in these fields, it is hardly surprisingly that corpus linguistics and Cognitive linguistics inspire all the chapters of this volume in one way or another.

In terms of structure, the book moves from more general and theoretical contributions illustrated with detailed examples of phraseological analysis to more practical proposals in these two fields. Revealing descriptions of the application of Cognitive linguistics and Grammar Construction tenets to phraseology in Chapter One give way to the explanation of a phraseotranslatological approach in the translation of idiomaticity in Chapter Two. The precise connection between translation and phraseodidactics is illustrated in Chapter Three, where the teaching of future translators is the main concern. Chapter Four, however, explores another basic matter, the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and its supplements. Also concerned with this European document but focussing on other variables, the next chapter, Chapter Five, looks at language transfer and the effects of the mother tongue as relevant factors to be taken into account in phraseology teaching. Chapter Six develops corpus linguistics methods for both phraseological analysis and didactic proposals whilst the last chapter addresses another challenge for phraseodidactics, digital material development. More information about the content of the chapters can be found in the following section.

Any proposal in the field of applied phraseology must be based on accurate descriptions of the aspects involved in the nature of PUs. Dimitrij Dobrovol’skij opens this volume with a discussion in which he highlights the importance of a theory of phraseology to explain all the semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and discursive peculiarities of all types of PUs. Focussing on idioms and phraseological constructions, in his contribution, he addresses current theoretical issues which have decisive pedagogical implications. The first issue is related to the classification and terms used for multiword expressions. Secondly, he goes on to deal with central cognitive aspects of phraseological research, such as the storage ←10 | 11→and processing of idioms, aspects which have consequences for the effective learning and use of idioms. Also within the cognitive framework, he explains the connections between phraseology and construction grammar, not just for phraseological constructions, but also for idioms. In this sense, Dimitrij D. points to construction grammar as an effective tool for explaining certain types of idiom variation. On the other hand, he argues that contrastive phraseology can also benefit from cognitive methods since they offer the possibility of clarifying small semantic differences in pairs of units of different languages with a completely or almost identical lexical structure. Finally, he scrutinizes the lexicographical representation of phraseological meaning revealing strategies to formulate adequate descriptions of meanings in monolingual dictionaries and to represent the semantic of idioms in bilingual dictionaries moving beyond the traditional search of interlinguistic equivalences in the system.

The next chapters tackle issues of the two research areas of applied phraseology dealt with in this volume: phraseodidactics and phraseotranslation. In Chapter Two, Mª Isabel González-Rey addresses the problem of translating idiomatic language focussing on the process of rendering the idiomaticity of the source text (ST) into the target text (TT). Her contribution belongs to the more specific field of phraseotranslatology, a field that she clearly distinguishes from other branches of applied phraseology identifying its purpose as the study of the theory and practice of the translation of phraseology. Adopting a phraseotranslatological approach and in order to offer a thorough procedure, González-Rey stresses the importance of taking into account the possibilities of combining words to explain the different degrees of idiomaticity of literary texts. These different degrees must lead to different paths in the translation of literature. For the sake of building a sound framework, she develops a phraseotranslatological model which rests on two central concepts, phraseologization and idiomatization, which make up two stages designed to solve the translation of what she calls “the phraseological fabric” of the text without betraying the idiomaticity. The consideration that the idiomaticity of a literary text may not just be the result of the phraseology which it includes is crucial. This means that the translation of idiomaticity must take into consideration more aspects apart from the translation of the PUs in a text.