¿Coger con las manos en la masa es una locución o una colocación?

Abstract

Abstract This article aims at presenting a lexicographical proposal focused on Spanish expressions that are made up of a verb and an adverbial idiom (e.g. dormir a pierna suelta, estar hasta los pelos, luchar/defender a brazo partido, reír a mandíbula batiente and ver/mirar con buenos ojos). These polilexical units have been defined by several linguists as complex collocations (e.g. Barrios Rodríguez 2015; García-Page Sánchez 2004, 2013; Koike 2001, 2005; Penadés Martínez 2017). Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as dictionaries of idioms, have managed these units in different ways. In fact, they are sometimes labelled as verbal idioms, and other times as adverbial ones. Considering these facts, this paper proposes a taxonomy for the Diccionario fraseológico multilingüe digital (DFMD), a digital multilingual dictionary of idioms currently being compiled at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Our proposal is based on the comparison between the lexicographical data currently available on the one hand, and the information that can be obtained from the academic corpus CORPES XXI on the other. As a result of this comparison, we identify four classes of possible relations between adverbial idioms and verbs that precede them. For each of these relationships, we suggest an ad hoc lemmatization, the purpose of which is to encourage the development of users’ phraseological competence by providing them with clear, reliable and easy-to-use information. As a result, in the following sections we introduce, firstly, the state of the art concerning complex collocations (Section 1) and, secondly, the corpus collected and the parameters adopted for its selection and analysis (Section 2). Later, we describe our lexicographical proposal and its application to the DFMD by offering some examples of records for the Spanish-Italian / Italian-Spanish repertoire (Section 3). Finally, we infer some conclusions and food for thought for future investigations (Section 4).