Phraseological Units

Book excerpt: Phraseological Units: basic concepts and their applicationPhraseology, an established concept in central and eastern Europe, has in recent years received increasing attention in the English-speaking world. It has long been clear to language learners and teachers that a native speaker's competence in a language goes well beyond a lexico-semantic knowledge of the individual words and the grammatical rules for combining them into sentences; linguistic competence also includes a familiarity with restricted collocations (like break the rules), idioms (like spill the beans in a non-literal sense) and proverbs (like Revenge is sweet), as well as the ability to produce or understand metaphorical interpretations. The first five papers of this volume set out to define the basic phraseological concepts collocation, idiom, proverb, metaphor and the related one of compound (-word). The remaining six papers explore a series of issues involving analytic, quantitative, computational and lexicographic aspects of phraseological units. The volume, as a whole, is a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to this blossoming field of linguistics.