Phraseology in Action: Theoretical Insights and Practical Approaches to Constructional Idioms, Idioms, Proverbs, and More

Autori

Fabio Mollica (a cura di)
Università degli Studi di Milano image/svg+xml
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5885-068X (non autenticato)
Carolina Flinz (a cura di)
Università degli Studi di Milano image/svg+xml
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8973-2827 (non autenticato)
Rita Luppi (a cura di)
Università di Bologna image/svg+xml
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8357-3119 (non autenticato)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/milanoup.233

Keywords:

Phraseology, Formulaic Language, Construction Grammar, Figurative Language, Crosslinguistic Studies

Sinossi

This volume provides an extensive overview of contemporary phraseology research, comprising nineteen contributions that span various languages, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. Topics explored include constructional idioms, metaphor and metonymy, discourse markers, diachronic change, and the use of phraseological units in various textual and cultural contexts. By bringing together corpus-based studies, cognitive and pragmatic analyses, historical perspectives, and research on minority and endangered languages, the volume highlights the richness and diversity of formulaic language. Overall, it demonstrates the ongoing value of phraseology in providing insights into the relationship between language, culture, and communication.

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Biografie autore

Fabio Mollica, Università degli Studi di Milano

is an Associate Professor of German Language and Linguistics at the University of Milan. He studied Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and earned a PhD in German Linguistics from the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on the interface between lexicon and syntax within German linguistics, drawing on Construction Grammar, Valency Grammar, and Cognitive Linguistics. He also works in applied areas such as contrastive linguistics (German–Italian and other Romance languages), phraseology, bilingual lexicography, and German as a foreign language. He has participated in and coordinated several national and international projects. He is a member of the Executive Board of Europhras and of the International Scientific Council of the IDS.

Carolina Flinz, Università degli Studi di Milano

is an Associate Professor of German Language and Linguistics at the Department of Humanities, University of Pavia. She obtained her PhD in German Linguistics in 2008 at the University of Pisa, specialising in German-Italian lexicography. From 2008 to 2018 she worked as a lecturer at the University of Pisa, and from 2018 to October 2025 at the University of Milan. In 2017, she received a Humboldt Research Fellowship and conducted research at the University of Mannheim. In 2019, she was a DAAD fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language. She has co-edited Korpora DaF (KorDaF) since 2021 and the series KORLING since 2026. She was an Associated Investigator in the COPLUS project (2023–2026) and has been a board member of Euralex since 2024.

Rita Luppi, Università di Bologna

received her PhD from the University of Milan in 2022 and is currently a Junior Assistant Professor of German Language and Linguistics at the University of Bologna. In 2020/21, she was a DAAD fellow at the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim; in 2024/25, she held a research fellowship at the TU Berlin and at the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien (MMZ) in Potsdam, funded by a Marco Polo scholarship from the University of Bologna. She has participated in various national and international research projects and authored numerous publications. In 2025 she published her first monograph, Erzählen und Wiedererzählen. Analyse narrativer Rekonstruktion in mehrfachen Interviews mit deutschsprachigen Migrant:innen in Israel (Verlag für Gesprächsforschung). Her research interests include Conversation Analysis, corpus linguistics, and languages for specific purposes.

Maricel Esteban-Fonollosa, Universitat de València

is an Assistant Professor (accredited as Associate Professor by ANECA) in German Philology at the University of Valencia (Spain), where she teaches and conducts research at the Faculty of Philology, Translation and Communication. Her research focuses on phraseology, Construction Grammar, and linguistic creativity, with a strong emphasis on corpus-based and contrastive approaches to German and Spanish. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics, applied and pedagogical research, and language-related digital discourse. She is actively involved in the academic community through international publications, the co-editing of journal issues and volumes, and her regular participation as a speaker at national and international conferences.

 

Herbert J. Holzinger, Universitat de València

obtained his doctorate in Romance Languages and Linguistics from the University of Salzburg (Austria)  in 1984. Since 1985 he has taught and conducted research at the University of Valencia (Spain), wher he has been a Full Professor since 1999 (Profesor Titular de Universidad). His teaching activities include German as a Foreign Language at all levels as well as German grammar and linguistics. His main research interests are German phraseology, contrastive phraseology German–Spanish, German as a Foreign Language, and the use of IT in research and teaching of German. The results of his research are published in national and international conference papers, articles in journals, and book chapters. He retired in October 2023.

Pedro Ivorra Ordines, Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza

is a Lecturer at Centro Universitario de la Defensa (Zaragoza), has held a Margarita Salas (Spain) Fellowship hosted by Carmen Mellado Blanco and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (Germany) hosted by Thomas Hoffmann. He has published in prestigious international journals including Yearbook of Phraseology, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Linguistics Vanguard or International Journal of Bilingualism, and for renowned publishing houses such as CUP, Elsevier, De Gruyter or Peter Lang. He is also the author of the monograph Comparative Constructional Idioms in Spanish, English and French. A Contrastive Usage-based Approach (to appear this year in the De Gruyter Formulaic Language series). He has been a member of the FRASESPAL research group since 2017, and now he is a member of the research project Creativity through the lens of Construction Grammar: a corpus and AI-based repository of constructional idioms in German, Spanish and English, led by Carmen Mellado Blanco.

 

Ana Mansilla-Pérez, Universidad de Murcia

is an Associate Professor of German Philology at the University of Murcia (Spain). She has been a member of the research group FRASESPAL since 2007 and is currently involved in the CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS research project (Creativity through the lens of Construction Grammar: a corpus and AI-based repository of constructional idioms in German, Spanish and English), led by Carmen Mellado, as well as the European COST Action CA22115 (PhraConRep). She is the co-author of the bilingual idiomatic dictionary Idiomatik Deutsch–Spanisch (2013), coordinated by Carmen Mellado Blanco. Her research focuses on German–Spanish contrastive phraseology, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, construction grammar and the teaching of German as a foreign language.

Nely M. Iglesias Iglesias, Universidad de Salamanca

is a Non-tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Philology at the University of Salamanca, where she teaches German language, linguistics and applied linguistics. Her research focuses on Spanish-German contrastive phraseology, lexicography, and German as a foreign language. She is the co-author of several dictionaries (PONS, Klett), including Idiomatik Deutsch–Spanisch (Buske, 2013). She coordinates the official Goethe German examinations at the University of Salamanca and is responsible for German in the University Entrance Examinations (PAU) in Castilla y León. She has participated in four research projects led by Carmen Mellado Blanco, the most recent being CREA-CONSTRIDIOMS.

 

Larissa Naiditch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

is a Professor emerita at the Faculty of Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and holds a Ph.D. in Germanic languages from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). She worked as a lecturer and an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests are: 1) phonology, grammar and dialectology of Germanic languages, 2) theory of translation, 3) languages in contact, 3) grammar and phraseology of Russian. Her publications include: 1.“Und Faustens Silhouette in der Ferne”. Beiträge zu Poetik und Linguistik: Deutsch-Russisch. Peter Lang. 2012. 2 Trubochist ili Lord? Teorija i praktika nemecko-russkogo i russko-nemeckogo perevoda. Zlatoust. SPb. 2015. With Anna Pavlova. 3. Prädikatives Attribut. Eine Vergleichsstudie für Russisch und Deutsch. Frank & Timme. With Anna Pavlova. 4. Das Mennonitenplatt (Plautdietsch) nach den Fragebögen aus dem Archiv Schirmunski. Probleme des Vokalismus. ZDL 2024. 91, 3, p. 347–366.

Anna Pavlova, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

is a Research Fellow at the Slavic Department, Faculty “Language. Translation. Culture” at the University of Mainz (Germany). Her research interests include grammar, translation, phonetics, intonology. Her current work focuses on phraseme constructions and their semantics, pragmatics, grammar, and prosody, with an emphasis on contrastive Russian–German analysis. She is developing a comprehensive, didactically-oriented online repository of phraseme constructions.
Selected publications: Ot lingvistiki k mifu (ed., 2013); Trubočist ili lord? (2015, with L. Naidič); Perevodčeskij bilingvizm (2016, with I. Ovčinnikova); Deutsch-russisches und russisch-deutsches Wörterbuch der Paronyme (2022), Textbook of Russian Phraseology (2022), Thesaurus für die Förderung der Textproduktion für Deutsch- und Russischlernende (2022).

Silvia Cataldo, University of Alicante

works as a Lecturer in the German section of the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Alicante, where she completed her PhD in Translation Studies, Professional and Audiovisual Translation. She is a member of the research groups FRASYTRAM and MIGRANTRAD and has published several contributions in journals and books focusing on metaphors and phraseology in Italian, Spanish and German, also in connection with humour and audiovisual translation.

 

Azra Hodžić-Čavkić, University of Sarajevo

is a Bosnian linguist whose scholarly work focuses on phraseology, idiomatic constructions, and discourse analysis in contemporary Bosnian. She is the author of numerous scientific and professional papers published in relevant journals and edited volumes, as well as of the monograph Idiomatic Constructions in the Bosnian Language: Structure and Use. She is also a co-author of Sarajevo Corpus of SMS Messages in Bosnian and Dictionary of Bosnian Blends. Her research encompasses cognitive linguistic, pragmasemantic, and corpus-based approaches to language. She actively participates in research projects and conferences and contributes to the development of Bosnian studies through her editorial work in the journal Pismo and her mentorship at her home institution, the University of Sarajevo – Faculty of Philosophy, where she is an assistant professor. Since April 2020 she has been editing the page www.idiomnadan.com

 

Nicole Mazzetto, University of Freiburg

holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Padua. She is pursuing a PhD at the University of Freiburg, where her research focuses on the synchronic motivation of French idiomatic expressions. Her academic interests include cognitive linguistics, phraseology, and synchronic motivation. Her professional experience also includes work in publishing and language teaching.

 

Paola Maria Cotta Ramusino, Università degli Studi di Milano

is a Full Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics at the University of Milan. She graduated from the University of Pavia and earned a PhD in Slavic Studies from Sapienza University of Rome. Her research focuses on Russian and Slavic linguistics, with particular attention to morphosyntax, lexicon, and phraseology. In this area, she studies phraseological units from a cognitive perspective and within the framework of Construction Grammar, as evidenced by her coordination of the Frame project (with F. Mollica), numerous national and international publications, the monograph Lexicon and Phraseology in the Post-Revolutionary Decade (2018), and the co-edited volume Contrastive Phraseology. Languages and Cultures in Comparison (with F. Mollica, 2020). Her recent work explores phraseological units as discourse markers and the image component of idiomatic expressions.Inizio modulo

 

Mélody Rodríguez Cebrián, Universidad de Murcia

is an Assistant Professor at the University Center for Defense in Zaragoza and a member of the LediCUDe (Language, Discourse, Culture and Defence) research group. She holds a PhD in Arts and Humanities from the University of Murcia. Her doctoral research focused on the taxonomic classification of behavioral pragmatemes and the development of the PRAGTAL online dictionary. Her primary research interests include phraseodidactics and contrastive phraseology (French-Spanish). She has presented work at international conferences such as AESLA, EUROPHRAS, and PHRASIS, exploring the use of pragmatemes in French for Specific Purposes (FSP), corpus-based analysis, and pragmatic deficiencies in non-native speakers.

 

Martine Dalmas, Sorbonne Université

studied German language and literature in France and Germany. After her Ph.D. in linguistics, she received her Habilitation degree in German linguistics from Paris-Sorbonne University (now Sorbonne-University), where she taught German and comparative linguistics as full professor, headed the German Department and led a research group in syntax and semantics. Since 2022 she has been Professor Emeritus at Sorbonne University. Her current research focuses on lexicology and discourse analysis. She has been collaborating for many years with the German Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache (Mannheim) and has been invited to numerous universities in Europe. She is a member of the scientific board of several journals. Fields: discourse markers, information structure; synonymy; phraseology

Alicia Silvestre Miralles, Universidad de Zaragoza

is a Professor of Spanish Language at the University of Zaragoza. European PhD in Modern Philology (USAL). Books: La traducción bíblica en la Subida del Monte Carmelo (2015) y Lenguaje y sensibilidad (2022), El humorismo en sus géneros (2023), Territorios transfronterizos (2025), Persuasión, asertividad y liderazgo en el discurso (2026), El Sello de los Sellos (G. Bruno), Vida Primera (F. de Asís) y El Prisionero de Toledo. Erasmus grant (Rome, 1999). Conversation assistant (Limoges, 2005, MECD), Visiting Professor (2006, MECD) in Washington D.C. MAEC-AECID lecturer (2007-2009) and professor (2010-2017) at the University of Brasilia. Research groups: GENUS (UNIZAR), PYPA (France), TRADHUC (UVA), FERSE (URJC) and SEMyLEX (UAM). Corresponding member for Spain of the Brazilian Association of Letters (2024).



Wolfgang Mieder, University of Vermont

is a Professor Emeritus of German and Folklore at the University of Vermont, where he taught for fifty years and served as the Chairperson of the Department of German and Russian for more than three decades. While he occupies himself with fairy tales, legends, and folk songs as well as philological and literary matters, his main research interest lies in paremiology. From 1984-2021 he was the editor of Proverbium: Yearbook of International Prover Scholarship. He is known internationally as a narrative and proverb scholar by way of his numerous books in German and English. He has been recognized by honorary doctorates from the universities of Athens, Bucharest, and Vermont as well as a German “Bundesverdienstkreuz” (Cross of Merit).

Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt, Geschäftsstelle fide

holds a degree in German Studies at the University of Sofia (Bulgaria). She completed her doctorate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Pécs (Hungary) with a dissertation on computer-assisted paremiography. Her research interests include paremiology and paremiography, standardized foreign and second language assessment, and verbal and visual humor. She is the co-editor of the volume Introduction to Paremiology: A Comprehensive Guide to Proverb Studies, as well as of the academic journal Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship and its Online Supplement Series.  She currently heads the “Quality assurance and test development of fide tests” unit at the Secretariat fide in Bern, Switzerland.

Zoltán Gotthardt, Unabhängiger Forscher

is a Lead Software Developer based in Switzerland and also works as an independent researcher. His research interests include data compression as well as paremiology and paremiography. He is co-author of several publications in proverb research, including “Който търси, намира” – Searching for Bulgarian Proverbs on the Web (2011), Sprichwörter im Bulgarischen nationalen Korpus (2012), Gibt es tatsächlich antonyme Sprichwörter? (2017), Mehrsprachige Sprichwortdatenbank als unterstützendes Tool für die parömiologische Forschung (2020), and Im Schnittfeld von digitaler Lexikographie und modernem Sprichwortgebrauch: Mehrsprachige internetbasierte Sprichwortdatenbank (2023).

Martin Braxatoris, Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

(1983) is a literary historian at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He studied at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, in Bratislava, and has taught Slovak language and culture abroad. His research focuses on Slovak literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, occasional poetry in the vernacular, and early Slavic homiletics and hymnography. He has also published on the earlier history of Slovak, thematic and motif-based aspects of older literature, and the relationship between language, text, and literary history. He is the author of Semantics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of Occasional Works in Slovak Literature (2025) and So-Called Methodius’ Canon to Demetrius of Thessalonica (2022), and co-author of several monographs.

 

Anita Braxatorisová, Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

is a Research Fellow at the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on Slovak–German–Hungarian interlingual issues, translation equivalence, and cultural differences in linguistic imagery from the perspective of comparative phraseology and axiological processes in language use. Her research is based on corpus and applied linguistics, approaches that she applies not only to contemporary language use but also to printed journals and manuscripts from the 19th century. These interests resulted in the following co-authored works: Perspektiven einer Zeitschrift am Beispiel des Tirnauer Wochenblatts (1869–1918) and Samuel Ferjenčík und sein Buch der Exzerpte und Notizen.

Irene Simonsen, University of Southern Denmark

is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Her research focuses on genre linguistics, phraseology, and stylistics, often from a contrastive German–Danish perspective. Awarded in 2016, her PhD in Applied Linguistics examined Danish as a second/foreign language, specifically BA students’ written genre competence in L2 Danish and their mastery of formulaic language across selected genres in comparison with native Danish speakers. She also works on phraseodidactics, vocabulary acquisition, and writing pedagogy in language education.

Tamás Forgács, University of Szeged

is a Full Professor in the Department of Hungarian Linguistics at the University of Szeged, where he served as chair of department from 2006 to 2024, and holds a doctorate (DSc) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on historical linguistics, syntax, and, above all, phraseology. He has served for several terms as a member of the Linguistics Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and is currently its vice-chair. He is the director of the Hungarian Linguistics Program at the Doctoral School of Linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Szeged. His scientific and teaching work has received numerous awards (e.g., Széchenyi Professorial Fellowship, Outstanding Hungarian Dictionary Award, Golden Pen Award).

Saša Bjelobaba, University of Zagreb

holds degrees in English and Italian Studies and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Zagreb. His doctoral thesis on the semantic analysis of Italian locative prepositions, awarded summa cum laude, was published as the monograph Znanje o prostoru u jezičnom znanju (2022). He is a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, where he teaches Italian and English. His research interests include semantics, cognitive linguistics, phraseology, terminology, languages for specific purposes, grammatography, contact linguistics and cross-linguistic research, as well as applied linguistics in language teaching. He is also the author of the textbook Leggere non stanca (2009).

 

Lidija Orešković Dvorski, University of Zagreb

is an Associate Professor at the Department of Romance Studies of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Since 2013 she has also been teaching French phonetics to opera singing students at the Music Academy in Zagreb, where she regularly participates in projects as a coach in diction, pronunciation, and libretto translation. Her research focuses on phonetics and the teaching of French as a foreign language, phraseology, contact linguistics, as well as Croatian dialectology. She is the author of the open access monograph Tekstna vezna sredstva u hrvatskom i francuskom znanstvenom diskursu (2021).

Tiziana Roncoroni, Università degli Studi di Bergamo

studied, obtained her PhD and taught German Language and Linguistics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Dortmund (Germany). She is currently a Senior Researcher (ricercatrice) in German linguistics at the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research focuses on scientific languages and pre-scientific writing, text linguistics, phraseology, idiomaticity, deictic-based cohesive devices, argumentation analysis and varieties of German. She also works from an interlingual and translation perspective (German–Italian language pair).

Luisa Giacoma, Università della Valle d'Aosta

is a Professor of German Language and Linguistics at the University of Valle d’Aosta. Since 2003 she has taught at several Italian universities (Turin, Milan, Verona) and has delivered seminars at various European universities and institutions (Bochum, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Saarbrücken, Stuttgart and Trier, European Parliament in Luxembourg). From 2015 to 2016 she taught at Technische Universität Dresden, where she is currently mentor, ambassador for Italy and representative for Europe. She is the co-author of numerous German-Italian dictionaries and books, both general and phraseological, published by leading publishers such as Zanichelli, Loescher, Klett, Buske and Peter Lang. She is also a member of several international research groups and scientific committees.

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giugno 30, 2026

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