Specialized Idioms: From LGP to LSP Phraseological Paradigm

Abstract

AbstractIn the last decades there has been an ever-increasing interest in the study of phraseology in language for specific purposes (LSP). Literature shows that the definitions offered by descriptive studies focus mainly on the alleged obligatory presence of terms (specialized lexical units) as components of specialized phraseological units. Recent studies have shown, however, that LSP phraseology has more features in common with phraseology in language for general purposes (LGP) than has been traditionally claimed by scholars in the fields of LSP and Terminology. This paper presents four specialized phraseological unit (SPU) instantiations per language in Spanish, English, and French. The units of analysis were extracted from two bilingual (Spanish-English and French-English) dictionaries related to Commerce and Economics. These specialized phraseological units were identified and classified by means of a revised definition of specialized phraseological unit and a taxonomy for their classification based on LGP studies. This taxonomy presents specialized phraseological units as a category containing three subcategories, namely (i) specialized idioms, (ii) specialized collocations, and (iii) specialized pragmatemes. The analysis carried out on the above-mentioned twelve specialized phraseological units, shows evidence of semantic, syntactic, and lexical idiomaticity, thus proving the existence of specialized idioms. This framework can be used as a tool to evaluate the feasibility of using the suggested taxonomy and definition for the identification and classification of specialized phraseological units in LSP domains other than Commerce and Economics.KeywordsSpecialized idiomsSpecialized phraseologyTerminologyLSP