Comparable phrasemes in English and Italian: a quantitative, typological and methodological survey

This presentation reports on one area of overlap in the lexicons of English and Italian, that of phrasemes which are comparable from the points of view of both form and meaning, for example, ‘a matter of life and/or death - una questione di vita o di morte’. Phrasemic pairs of this sort have been studied above all from the point of view of loan translation, especially from English to Italian, an important study being that of Klajn (1972:131-137), though calquing is by no means the only reason for the existence of such phrasal pairs. The main purposes of the present paper are: (i) to quantify the phenomenon of comparable phrasemes in modern English and Italian; (ii) to illustrate the different types of phraseme involved; (iii) to discuss the various reasons for the existence of such pairs; (iv) to discuss the difficulties involved in establishing which reason is applicable in the case of a given phrasal pai