Le unità fraseologiche: uno studio contrastivo tra inglese e italiano. ​

This research is based on a comparison between English and Italian phraseology. These two languages are known to belong to different language families: English is a West-Germanic language and Italian is a Romance language. Over the centuries, however, English has lost its initial Germanic identity and has acquired a dual nature, due to borrowings both lexical and phraseological from Latin, during the Christianization of the British Isles (after 597 A.D.), and French, following the Norman conquest (1066). This is the reason why, in present-day English and Italian phraseology, there are some cases of surprising similarity, which contrast more common instances of absolute distance. The term phraseology refers to (the study of) a set of fixed expressions, such as idioms and phrases, which are proper of a language. In greater detail, a phraseme or phraseologism is a combination of at least two words, commonly used by native speakers of a language, whose idiomatic meaning is completely different from the sum of the meanings of its constituents. My fondness for the English language made me become first aware and later interested in the theme of phraseology. In fact, this peculiar lexical aspect of language, which is culturally connoted and historically motivated, is often ignored by native speakers. In addition, learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) usually find it difficult to acquire phraseology since idioms are more likely to be spoken than written and also tend not to be borrowed directly. This dissertation is divided into three chapters; the topic of the first chapter is the discipline of phraseology, which is described as a branch of lexicology. The second chapter focuses on the translation of phraseology, which can lead to three different situations: the exact translation, the metaphorical translation and the paraphrase, where there is no correspondence between the two languages. In the third chapter, some examples of phraseology are provided in order to detect the similarities and differences between English and Italian and also to suggest the most appropriate translation techniques to be applied. The phraseological units considered are part of the project The Phraseology of English: A Contrastive Study with French and Other Romance Languages, which is being carried out by Professor Ramón Martí Solano at the University of Limoges, France. ​