Antonio Pamies Bertrán Knihy

Fixed multi-word units can be focused from a qualitative perspective (according to their morpho-syntactic and semantic features) or from a quantitative one (for example, co-occurrence frequency higher than statistically expected). One can also try to connect both points of view, looking for causal relations between co-occurrence data and the dichotomy idiom principle vs. open choice principle, though the reality of text corpora shows that things are far from being so clear-cut, and that even the difference between phraseological and non phraseological combinations remains an open question, not to mention the number and types of phraseological sub-classes. Specialists from different countries and languages explain and debate their views and research on the presence of phraseology according to the results of modern empirical studies on real spoken and written language.

Language users of all ages and proficiency levels -from foreign language students to experienced translators- have often experienced the desperation caused by sequences of words whose meaning has none or little relation to the meaning of its constituents. This problem has not been adequately addressed in foreign language teaching methods, and, more often than not, dictionaries are of little help. Developers and users of automatic translation software are aware of the fact that idiomaticity and fixation have become the major issue in cross linguistic communication, and applied phraseological studies become a primary need once we acknowledge the frequency of this phenomenon and its prevalence in language economy. The great challenge for modern lexicography, especially cross-linguistic, is now to provide an adequate representation of formulaic and idiomatic combinations like idioms and collocations that are more and more considered as the object of a necessary branch of linguistic studies, though this task is far from easy. In this book, international specialists in theoretical contrastive linguistics, applied translatology, and phraseography, discuss their research and reflections on that important issue, taking especially into account its application to dictionary creation and language teaching.

The role of the relation between culture and language seems to appear and disappear along the history of linguistic theories. The best known examples are probably the Humboldtian ideas on Weltanschauung and the so-called relativism of Sapir's and Whorf's theories, unjustly oversimplified during the predominance of universalistic ambitions within this pendular confrontation of epistemological approaches. From an empirical point of view, the evidences of any connection between both levels have been traditionally taken from the lexico-semantic level, since they are hard to find in the phonological or the morphological levels, whose typology is restricted to a small number of communicative and/or logical possibilities. Recent studies on figurative language, and especially on the phraseological level have revealed a rich field of possibilities for the study of the cognitive networks (associations of ideas) underlying metaphors and idioms, based on a cultural background, more or less typical of a national linguistic community. Merging with the Russian tradition of Lexical Semantics and Lingvo-kulturologia, modern studies on phraseology are dealing with the problem of metaphor in culturally bound idioms, as a way to throw a new light on the eternal debate concerning how culture and language are embedded into each other.

Este trabajo está basado en las declaraciones textuales de los pacientes del Servicio de Urgencias del Hospital Universitario de Granada. Un lingüista y un médico estudian conjuntamente las peculiaridades del habla coloquial en contexto real, especialmente las del lenguaje metafórico. Las condiciones de estrés comunicativo y máxima espontaneidad que caracterizan el discurso del paciente hacen de éste un campo propicio para observar la creatividad lingüística, especialmente la forma en que se describen o nombran fenómenos cuyo nombre exacto a menudo ni siquiera es conocido por el hablante, activando mecanismos comunicativamente eficaces en los que subyacen estructuras semánticas recurrentes.