Idioms represent a significant challenge for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, including Moroccan high school students. This study explores the effectiveness of an action research intervention aimed at enhancing idiom comprehension through the application of embodiment and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) strategies. In this regard, a group of high school students (n=216) participated in targeted training designed to facilitate their understanding of idiomatic expressions. The results indicate a marked improvement in students' ability to comprehend idioms post-intervention. The data reveal that, across all idioms, 55.97% of responses were accurate interpretations, 36.17% were erroneous interpretations, and 6.71% were responses of "I don't know". This indicates that, on average, individuals correctly interpreted the idioms more frequently than they misinterpreted them, with a relatively small percentage expressing uncertainty. These findings underscore the importance of integrating embodiment and conceptual strategies in EFL pedagogy, highlighting their role in enriching the conceptual frameworks of learners, even in the context of a foreign language. This study contributes to the current body or research on effective teaching methods to help EFL students acquire figurative language skills. It also highlights the applications of the CMT and embodiment paradigms.
Phraseology as a distinct linguistic subsystem and the domain of figurative language share common ground, and they are often perceived in popular discourse as nearly identical. However, they are far from being the same. Phraseology-especially as understood today-constitutes a vast and intricately structured part of language, where figurativeness is characteristic of only some phrasemes, i.e., phraseological units. While the notion of figurativeness is intuitively clear, it remains especially difficult to define precisely. It is often associated with metaphor and metonymy, which, though partially correct, is insufficient: metaphorical transfers and metonymic shifts only occasionally give rise to figurative expressions.This study aims to clarify the relationship between phraseology and figurative language and, more importantly, to outline future directions in phraseology research, particularly that tied to the image component inherent in the semantics of many phrasemes. Additionally, it addresses several related issues, including: the interplay between figurativeness and idiomaticity the role of idiomaticity in shaping different classes of phrasemes criteria for identifying conventional figurative expressions in languageA key focus is developing methods for analyzing the semantics of figurative phrasemes (especially idioms) and examining the underlying conceptual images that often govern not only their actual meaning and semantic associations but also their discursive behavior.
Although the status of multiword units has been enhanced in recent years under the influence of corpus research, construction grammar, and cognitive linguistics, the role of idioms in foreign language acquisition remains a subject of debate within phraseodidactics. Idioms are regarded as a particularly difficult lexical area: as units of the secondary semiotic system, they are marked by semantic-pragmatic complexity, figurativeness, and underlying motivation, the evocation of mental imagery, and, at times, culture-specific peculiarities. These considerations are undeniably valid; however, the heterogeneity of the linguistic phenomena referred to as idioms is often overlooked, as are the numerous cross-linguistic parallels among European languages. Such parallels are didactically important and can significantly reduce these difficulties.This article aims to present an exemplary selection of idioms for Polish learners of German. The selection is based on plurilingual didactics and uses two criteria: (i) a frequency study of over 1,200 idiomatic multiword units in the corpora for spoken and written German, intended to empirically validate the communicative value of the selection; and (ii) a language-contrastive German-Polish study based on the assumption that the degree of difficulty of foreign idiom acquisition correlates closely with the interlingual convergence or divergence of the foreign and native phraseological lexis; that is, the amount of work required for idioms that are largely similar in the native and foreign language is considerably less than for zero-equivalent units. The linguistic contrastive study of 376 frequently used idiomatic multiword units serves in selecting and organizing the learning progression of these units according to the expected level of difficulty.
In a growing digital scenario where phraseology has become aware of technological realities, literary translation is timidly testing sophisticated AI-based tools. This study aims at assessing the quality of the output rendered by neural machine translation (NMT) systems, i.e., DeepL and Google Translate, and large language models (LLMs), i.e., ChatGPT and Gemini, in the English>Spanish translation of five comparative idioms extracted from literary texts. To this end, professional literary translators and translation undergraduates evaluate their output against human translation (HT), following the parameters proposed by Corpas Pastor and Noriega-Santi & aacute;& ntilde;ez (2024) to measure creativity in the translation of multiword-expressions: adequacy (morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) and novelty. The findings show that HT stands out, although NMT systems outperformed morphosyntactically. LLMs, especially ChatGTP, show promising creative results. Therefore, this study serves to reflect on the use of technologies for the translation of creative phraseology in the context of literature.
Paremiologists have shown little interest in whether polygenesis of two equivalent proverbs in two languages is possible or not. Few studies have shown that polygenesis does in fact exist. However, a very detailed historical analysis based on numerous contextualized references is required to prove that the two equal proverbs did not originate through monogenesis, with one proverb being no more than a loan translation of the other. This case study presents two chronologically arranged lists of references (including modern anti-proverbs) for the English proverb “Where there is a will, there is a way” and for the German proverb “Wo ein Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg”. A third list presents contextualized references that maintain the German proverb is a subsequent loan translation of the English proverb. While this would be an argument for monogenesis, a careful analysis of numerous references suggests that the two proverbs most likely originated independently of each other. If so, and if the data justifies this conclusion, it would, in fact, be a case demonstrating that polygenesis—although rare—is certainly possible for proverbs. In fact, the concise nature and even the identical structure of the two proverbs make polygenesis much more likely than would be the case with, for example, folk narratives. Nevertheless, polygenesis has not been ruled out completely for some longer fairy tales, ballads, etc., although there is no doubt that folklorists and paremiologists are correct that the dominant origin and distribution of proverbs is based on monogenesis. However, regarding the two proverbs under discussion here, “The exception proves the rule!” can support the view that, at least in this case, polygenesis is the determining factor regarding the independent origin of both proverbs.
The study aims to analyze addition, one of the most popular mechanisms of proverb variation in Anglo-American proverbs about money. The Anglo-American proverb transformations (or anti-proverbs) discussed and analyzed in the present study were taken primarily from American and British written sources. My discussion is organized in two parts. The first part of the study briefly demonstrates the background of research and terminology. I list 20 Anglo-American proverbs most popular for variation and mention the most frequent themes anti-proverbs address, with a special focus on proverbs about money. I also list the proverbs containing the word "money" and several of their variations. The second, and main part, of the article discusses addition, one of the most popular mechanisms of proverb transformation in 263 Anglo-American anti-proverbs about money. The focus is on the place of the addition. The study also examines how many components are added, followed by a discussion and exemplification of some other mechanisms of proverb variation combined with addition. Finally, I list and illustrate some themes emerging in Anglo-American proverb transformations.
The use of machine translation (MT) systems by undergraduate and postgraduate students has been analysed in different studies (Sycz-Opo & nacute; and Ga & lstrok;uskina 2017; Jia et al. 2019; Loock and L & eacute;chauguette 2021, to mention a few). An analysis of the German-into-Basque translation of multi-word expressions (Sanz-Villar 2024) observed that students' dependence on MT systems was very high; i.e., traces of the MT proposals were found in the outputs of translation trainees. To specifically analyse the impact of MT proposals on students' translations, two tasks were designed in 2021 in which nine students participated. Both tasks consisted of translating an excerpt of a children's literary text from German into Basque. The first translation task was done with the aid of MT tools and the second was a from-scratch translation where the use of MT systems was not allowed. The goal of the present study is to compare the results of both tasks, focusing on the translation of phraseological units (PUs) to observe the features of students' translations accomplished with and without the aid of MT tools. Since students used MT outputs during the first translation task, machine-translated texts are also compared to human-translated ones. The results show that the tendency to retain the phraseological character of the original text is stronger in professional translations than in machine-translated texts. In general, reliance on MT system outputs when translating PUs is quite strong among trainee translators. When comparing the results of the two tasks, it was observed that for some students, the number of techniques used to maintain the phraseological level of the original text increased in the translation done without MT. Interestingly, examples of creative translations were found in the translations done without the aid of MT tools.
Phraseological Units (PUs) in a language often include quotations and the so-called authorial "winged words" ("gefl & uuml;gelte Worte" in Gl & auml;ser 1986), which have a single known author. These units, by gaining popularity among the members of a community of speakers, take on a life of their own as PUs. This study illustrates how these quotations acquire meanings and uses that do not match those of the original formulation they derive from, which, in turn, sheds light on how linguistic expressions at large reach conventionalization through language change. Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) ranks high among the authors who have contributed most to the English Phrasicon. This study investigates two case studies where quotations by Shaw have made their way into the English language as PUs. These quotations, however, are often used, as we shall see, in a way that differs from the sense they had in their original context. This study analyses how some novel PUs are coined and can help us map the processes of semantic adaptation these PUs undergo as they become conventional. It also provides insights into what constitutes a PU and how their defining characteristics apply in these cases.
In Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (K & ouml;vecses, 2020), I offered a comprehensive overhaul of "standard" conceptual metaphor theory. The present paper attempts to demonstrate how the new view of CMT can handle metaphorical idioms. To this end, I analyze four metaphorical idioms from the thematic area of money (throw money about, money slips through someone's fingers, be a cash cow, money keeps someone/something afloat). The analysis assumes and starts out from the observation that money-related metaphors are based on two generic-level conceptual metaphors: money is a moving entity and money is a force. Extended CMT adds to CMT the notion of "mental space-level metaphors" that were largely ignored in "standard" CMT, but are given an important role in extended CMT. These are the metaphors that represent actual, contextual meanings in a metaphorical usage event. Traditional CMT-type analysis cannot account for the emergence of such idiomatic meanings because the mappings, or correspondences, of standard CMT work on a single, generic level (frame-, domain-, or even image schema level). However, the contextual meanings of naturally used metaphors (including those of metaphorical idioms) are much more information-rich and specific. The conceptual metaphors on the image schema, domain, and frame levels are offline structures in long-term memory, whereas the conceptual metaphors on the mental space level occur only online in working memory. In online communication, speakers mobilize the static image schema-, domain-, and frame-level metaphors at the mental space level, where they create highly specific mental space-level metaphors. Given this framework, it becomes possible to explain how and why the four metaphorical idioms have different contextual meanings (as represented by different mental space-level metaphors), but, at the same time, why they also share certain conceptual metaphors on the frame-, domain-, or image schema-level. Additionally, we gain new insight into how the emergence of novel metaphorical idioms occurs with the help of and constrained by a previously existing large system of hierarchically arranged conceptual metaphors.
As a class belonging to phraseology, winged words are characterized above all by the fact they are also used in other contexts as quotations, especially from literary texts (e.g., Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie from Goethes Faust I), thus acquiring a life of their own. However, they can be referred to the original sources in the consciousness of the language user. Forms of expression from areas other than literary areas, such as movies and television, advertising, etc., are increasingly gaining a comparable status in public language use. The imprinting of these expressions often stems from the fact that winged words are not only or no longer used as quotations but also used as a means of commenting on facts, evaluating them, etc., and at the same time calling up knowledge scenarios that refer to the original context of use as backgrounds for understanding. Over time, new patterns of expression may be established by modifying parts of the original formulation so that - expressed in construction grammar - new situationally adaptable form-meaning pairs can emerge. Based on this "phraseologization mechanism", problematic aspects of phraseology theory are identified and discussed using the example of Das also war des Pudels Kern. Finally, suggestions are made for the conceptual sharpening of the category "winged words".
This article focuses on metaphorical collocations, a special subtype of lexical collocations in which the cohesion between the constituents is based on a lexicalised metaphor (see Reder 2006; Volungevi & ccaron;ien & edot; 2008; Konecny 2010a, 2010b, 2023). The word combinations in question can develop from originally free sequences into recurrent patterns appearing in several semantically related collocations if they occur repeatedly in similar contexts (see Stoji & cacute; and Ko & scaron;uta 2020, 2021). A case in point is the German collocation die Zeit verfliegt and its equivalents in Croatian, English and Italian: vrijeme leti ('time flies'), time flies (by), and il tempo vola (via) ('time flies (away)'), which convey a rapid movement and the feeling of time rushing by. The various patterns often also reflect cultural concepts and experiences; for example, a pattern that conceptualises time as a resource could be anchored in a cultural idea that regards time as something valuable. Metaphorical collocations thus frequently reflect superordinate conceptual metaphors that are located at a cognitive level and common to more than one language community. Nevertheless, the concrete language-specific manifestations may vary, and in many cases show only partial equivalence.Unlike idioms, where metaphor has long been recognised as a fundamental semantic process (see, e.g., Casadei 1996: passim; Dobrovol'skij and Piirainen 2009: 19-29), collocations have not been thoroughly examined in this regard. It is therefore necessary to gain a more detailed insight into the semantic-cognitive processes underlying the creation of lexical combinations to draw conclusions regarding their relevance for the emergence of collocational sequences. This requires an analysis of extensive authentic language material, which will allow for the development of a catalogue of criteria that facilitates the identification and classification of these specific linguistic phenomena. This paper focuses on uncovering such processes based on a study carried out using SketchEngine in web corpora of German, Croatian, English, and Italian with the aim of creating a clear framework for the identification of metaphorical collocations by elaborating criteria that can serve as guidelines and by attempting a classification into subtypes. The proposed criteria and typology can contribute to the systematic investigation of metaphorical collocations and should also open up perspectives for future work in this field.
Legal phraseology is an essential component of legal language, and thus of legal communication, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. It is also one of the main problems in legal translation since legal phraseological units are determined by law-specific factors, and as such are usually unknown to legal translators, who in most cases are not lawyers. As there are still no aids to support the translation of legal phraseology, legal translators struggle with legal phraseology. This is problematic for interlingual legal communication since certain fixed word combinations induce certain extra-linguistic actions in legal practice, thereby triggering legal consequences. A bad translation can cause the action intended by the sender to be omitted or another action to occur. Therefore, the didactization of legal phraseology for purposes of legal translation is a very important task for phraseodidactics. Since there is still no corresponding phraseodidactic approach, this paper proposes a didactic concept for the translation of legal phraseology to familiarize prospective and practicing legal translators with features of legal phraseology, teach them strategies for translating this phraseology, and show them how to develop tools for translating legal phraseology on its own. The paramount goal of such didactics is to ease the translation of legal phraseology and, ipso facto, improve the quality of interlingual legal communication. With this objective in mind, this article first outlines the most important prerequisites of legal translation and then highlights the features of legal phraseology, characterizing the individual types of legal phraseology by their communicative functions using German legal language as an example. Thereafter, the focus shifts to phraseodidactics, which can provide remedies for legal phraseology translation, analyzing the most important phraseodidactic methods so far proposed by phraseodidacticians. In concluding, the article presents a didactic concept for the translation of legal phraseology.
In contrast to the case of metaphorical and metonymical idioms, there is no research specifically concerned with Spanish hyperbolic idioms. This article shows that it is possible to apply different definitions and characterizations of hyperbole to idioms that should be considered hyperbolic. The analysis is based on idiomaticity and is supported by the distinction between the literal and idiomatic meanings of these fixed expressions. In the conclusions, seven criteria are established to identify hyperbolic idioms, and the types are differentiated according to: 1) the conceptual mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy that explain their formation, 2) the form and meaning of their constituent parts, and 3) the semantic fields in which they are included. Finally, we point out the need to continue analyzing these types of idioms from both a theoretical and an applied perspective, in the latter case with a possible view to marking them as hyperbolic in dictionaries.
Some adjectives in the German language can only be used in connection with a copula verb (e. g., ansichtig werden and eingedenk sein/bleiben). Other adjectives can have different meanings, among which a particular meaning restricted to predicative use (i. a. bar sein). Since these constructions consist of an adjective and a fixed verb component, they can be classified as phrasemes or even as verb phrasemes. Verb phrasemes and one-word lexemes can demand a certain number of complements with a particular form and syntactic function and a certain meaning. The choice of the valency characteristics of phrasemes with a predicative adjective as the subject of this article is explained by the fact they have not yet been systematically analyzed concerning the diachronic perspective.The research approach and method examine each phraseme in its valency occurrences, documenting these by examples found in historical and modern dictionaries as well as in corpora of different kinds from Old High German to Modern German. The valency occurrences consist of a combination of complements, which are recorded as so-called complete valency. Both the quantitative and qualitative variation of complements are contained in the complete valency and can therefore be called polyvalency. Quantitative polyvalency refers to the number of complements while qualitative polyvalency refers to the type of complements. Each combination of complements found in the research material is illustrated with an example. Finally, the quantitative and qualitative valency developments are summarized in a short commentary.
The project establishing the Croatian paremiological minimum and optimum began in 2014 during which valuable data was collected from 1,585 informants, who completed two sets of field questionnaires - the first and the second final text presentation of the proverbs occurring most frequently in the three biggest Croatian corpora (see Aleksa Varga and Keglevic 2020a). The questionnaires were analyzed using the model analysis developed by Chlosta and Grzybek (see Chlosta and Grzybek 2005, 2015 and Grzybek 2012), based on a 4-code system. Since part of the analysis of both studies regarding the zero variant and the familiarity of Croatian proverbs have already been published (see Aleksa Varga and Keglevic 2020b), the scope of this paper lies in analyzing the variations of the first, second, or third degree. As one of the goals of the research, apart from establishing the Croatian paremiological minimum and/or optimum, is also the construction of an electronic Croatian paremiological thesaurus, it is of utmost importance to analyze the proverb variations from the field questionnaires for inclusion in the database as well; i.e., to determine if they appear frequently enough alongside or instead of the proposed zero variant. Therefore, the present paper analyzes the Croatian proverb variants of the first, second, and third degree from the quantitative, qualitative, and corpus linguistic point of view, providing suggestions on further steps in constructing the Croatian proverbial thesaurus.
