How to Apply CxG to Phraseology: A Multilingual Research Project

Abstract

In the present research project, we will set out to design and populate a multilingual database which lists and describes Italian, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish phraseologisms. We firmly believe that the multilingual database will prove particularly useful in second language teaching. We will endorse the holistic perspective of Construction Grammar as our theoretical and applied framework (Goldberg, 1995; Croft, 2001): we conceive of phraseologisms, in particular idiomatic expressions, as ‘constructions’, i.e., form-meaning pairings whose meaning is not compositional. With reference to Croft (2001), we will describe multi-word units in their phonological, morpho-syntactic, semantico-pragmatic and discursive aspects (Schafroth, 2013) with the aim of providing an updated tool for second language acquisition and teaching purposes.