A quantitative comparison of the English and Spanish repertoires of figurative idioms

In language teaching circles it is widely recognised that English is a very idiomatic language. But would that not hold for all natural languages? In this chapter we zoom in on one subcomponent of idiomaticity, and present a corpus-based quantitative comparison of the relative prevalence of figurative idioms in English and Spanish. The results of the study suggest that Spanish makes use of idioms as intensively as English does. There is thus no reason why Spanish idioms (and idioms in any other target language) should not be awarded the same attention as English idioms have received in cognitive-linguistics inspired pedagogy. However, cross-lingual differences can definitely be discerned at the level of the kinds of clusters of idioms (defined in terms of their experiential source domains) that are comparatively popular in either language (as reflected in their variety and frequency of occurrence). We argue that such quantitative differences (and similarities) at the level of idiom clusters can be a useful source of information for teachers and materials writers.SCOPUS: ch.b