Synopsis
This book explores the evolving role of phraseology across three interconnected domains—phraseography, translation, and language teaching—from a contrastive and multilingual perspective.
Addressing the need for case-study-driven research that bridges theoretical and applied dimensions, the book explores the relationship between semantic and syntactic levels of meaning, cognitive processes, and cultural dimensions.
The contributions highlight key challenges such as the representation of phraseological units in dictionaries, translation-related equivalence, and the role of context, pragmatics, and diachronic perspectives. The section on language teaching zooms on phraseology in acquisition and empirically grounded strategies that enhance learners’ phraseological competence. This book contributes to the broader field of linguistics, offering valuable insights for researchers and educators.
Author Biographies
Paola Maria Cotta Ramusino, University of Milan
Paola Maria Cotta Ramusino is Full Professor of Russian Language and Linguistics at the University of Milan. She 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 with F. Mollica Contrastive Phraseology. Languages and Cultures in Comparison (2020). More recently, her work has explored phraseological units as discourse markers and the image component of idiomatic expressions.
Tatsiana Maiko, University of Milan
Tatsiana Maiko, PhD, is a tenure-track researcher in Slavic Studies at the University of Milan, Italy, where she teaches courses in Russian as a foreign language. Her research focuses on corpus linguistics, phraseology, second language acquisition, and learner corpus research. She is the author of the monograph Support Verb Constructions: A Russian–Italian Contrastive Analysis (2022) and of numerous scholarly articles.
Jekaterina Nikitina, University of Milan
Jekaterina Nikitina is an Associate Professor of English language, translation and linguistics at the University of Milan, where she lectures in linguistic mediation and discursive practices in legal and international settings. Jekaterina has published systematically on the topic of specialised phraseology, dealing with legal discourse and healthcare discourse from a variety of perspectives, including (Corpus-based) Discourse Analysis, (Legal) Translation Studies, Genre studies and knowledge dissemination. She is a member of the Corpus and Language Variation in English Research Group (CLAVIER), the Open Council of Europe Academic Networks (OCEAN), Council of Europe, the International Law and Language Association (ILLA). Her latest monograph is “Human Rights Discourse: Linguistics, Genre and Translation at the European Court of Human Rights” (Routledge, 2025).
Elena Berthemet, Centre de linguistique en Sorbonne
Elena Berthemet is a research associate at the Centre de Linguistique en Sorbonne (CeLiSo), Paris. Her current research interests include semantics, lexicography, phraseology, cross-cultural comparison, and didactics of French as a foreign language. She has published several articles in the fields of phraseography and didactics of foreign languages.
Elena Dal Maso, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Elena Dal Maso is Associate Professor of Spanish Language, Translation and Linguistics at the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies, Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research focuses primarily on the contrastive phraseology of Spanish and Italian, as well as on the diachronic study of modern scientific terminology. She is an active participant in several internationally recognised research initiatives, including Herramientas lexicográficas de la Universidad de Zadar (LEXUNIZD) and Comprensione ORAle, Lingue romanze, Intercomprensione e ValutazionE (CORALIVE), both funded by the European Union. Since 2023, she is co-editor of the series VenPalabras. Estudios de lingüística hispánica (Edizioni Ca' Foscari).
Aude Grezka, Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord
Aude Grezka is a research engineer at CNRS at the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris-Nord (LIPN, Sorbonne Paris Nord University), specializing in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She holds a PhD in linguistics, and her research focuses on the modeling of linguistic structures and lexical representation aimed at improving automatic text analysis and understanding. She leads the Morfetik project, an evolving lexical resource dedicated to the French language for natural language processing. She also coordinates the International Research Project (IRP CNRS) PhraséoPrag, devoted to the modeling of pragmatic phraseologisms in French and Japanese.
Natalia Soler Cifuentes, PLEIADE: Patterns de diversité et réseaux de fonctions
Natalia Soler Cifuentes is a lecturer in Spanish linguistics and Spanish-French translation at Sorbonne Paris Nord University. Her research focuses on lexicology, particularly brand names and proper names in general, neology, corpus linguistics, and specialized translation in the economic and legal fields.
Laura Pinnavaia, University of Milan
Laura Pinnavaia is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Milan (Italy) and head of the PhD programme “Studi Linguistici, Letterari e Culturali in Ambito Europeo ed Extra-Europeo”. Her research interests in lexicology and lexicography have resulted in the publication of over forty articles, a series of co-edited monographs and three authored monographs: The Italian Borrowings in the OED: A Lexicographic, Linguistic and Cultural Analysis (Bulzoni 2001); Food and Drink Idioms in English: “A Little Bit More Sugar and Lots of Spice” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), and Introducing Sociolinguistics: A Glance at the English-speaking Social and Cultural Worlds (Carocci 2023). More recently, she has also been working on English travelogues about Italy issued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Elmar Schafroth, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Elmar Schafroth is Professor Emeritus of Romance Linguistics at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. His research interests include lexicology, lexicography, language and gender, language and music, varieties of language, phraseology, construction grammar, and discourse linguistics. He is the author of three monographs, including the 2014 publication Französische Lexikographie, as well as numerous articles. He has also edited many collections, such as Vergleichende Diskurslinguistik (2019, with Goranka Rocco), and has edited two academic series published by Peter Lang and Erich Schmidt. In 2025, he edited the Manuale di Fraseologia Italiana with Riccardo Imperiale and Erica Autelli, published by Edizioni dell’Orso.
Maria Alekseyeva, Ural State Pedagogical University
Maria Alekseeva holds a Doctor of Philology (Doctor habilitatus) degree specializing in comparative-historical, typological and contrastive linguistics. She is a professor in the Department of Romance and Germanic Studies, Institute of Foreign Languages at the Ural State Pedagogical University. She is the author of 200 academic publications in the fields of translation studies, lexicography, and contrastive and comparative-historical linguistics. Her primary research interest is the comparative analysis of translations of Fëdor Dostoevskij’s major novels at the diachronic and synchronic levels.
Adriano Murelli, University of Turin
Adriano Murelli is Associate Professor for German language, linguistics and translation at the University of Turin. Before being appointed in Turin, he worked at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim) and at the Universities of Freiburg, Insubria (Como) and Konstanz. His research interests include German linguistics, contrastive linguistics, areal-typological linguistics, variation linguistics, comic linguistics and foreign language acquisition.
Matej Meterc, Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language
Matej Meterc is a researcher at the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and an assistant professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU. His research focuses on phraseology and paremiology. He contributes to the third edition of the Dictionary of the Slovenian Standard Language (eSSKJ; 2016–). He is the chief editor of the Dictionary of Proverbs and Similar Paremiological Expressions (2020–). He has published numerous articles, as well as two monographs: Paremiological Optimum: The Best-Known and Most Common Proverbs and Related Paremias in Slovenian (2017) and Unconventional Phraseological Replies in Slovenian (2026).
Alberto Bramati
Alberto Bramati, a translator of novels, plays and essays in the humanities, is an associate professor of French Language and Translation at the Università degli Studi di Milano. His research focuses on the linguistic challenges of translating from French into Italian, with a particular emphasis on grammatical ‘points of conflict’. In 2025, he published a contrastive grammar specifically designed for translators from French into Italian (Grammatica contrastiva per i traduttori dal francese. Le trappole della lingua, Edizioni Libreria Cortina, Milan)
Hana Bergerová, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem
Hana Bergerová pursued a degree in German and English Studies at Leipzig University. She earned her PhD in linguistics from Leipzig University under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard Helbig and completed her habilitation at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, in the field of the linguistics of emotions. For many years, she has been active in the field of German linguistics at the Department of German Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. Her research interests include phraseology—specifically phraseodidactics and phraseography—contrastive linguistics, and the linguistics of emotions. Since 2007, she has served as the editor-in-chief and co-editor of the scholarly journal “Aussiger Beiträge”.
Mariangela Albano, University of Cagliari
Mariangela Albano is an Associate Professor in French Linguistics and French as a Foreign Language at the University of Cagliari. Her research focuses primarily on the epistemology of cognitive approaches, as well as cognitive linguistics applied to the analysis of phraseology, metaphors, discourse (e.g., literary, tourism, didactics, advertising, engineering), and the teaching of French as a Foreign Language. Within this framework, she has studied both construction grammar and the cognitive mechanisms involved in the processing and translation of phraseology (French, German, Italian, and Turkish). Her research also extends to the history of French language teaching and learning.
Erla Hallsteinsdóttir, Aarhus University
Erla Hallsteinsdóttir is associate professor in German Business Communication at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. She studied Icelandic and German linguistics, literature, translation and foreign language teaching at the University of Iceland and Leipzig University. Her main areas of research and teaching include phraseology and vocabulary, corpus linguistics, text linguistics, intercultural communication and intercultural understanding, stereotypes, business and organisational communication, sustainability, German-Danish cooperation, language teaching (German and Danish as neighbouring languages) and comparative linguistics. She is a board member and treasurer of the European Society of Phraseology and the Danish Association of German Studies.
Marios Chrissou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Marios Chrissou is Professor at the Faculty of German Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he has served since 2001. He has been involved in the Master’s Programme “The Teaching of German as a Foreign Language” at the Hellenic Open University since 2001 and has served as its Director since 2017. His research focuses on linguistics and teaching of German as a foreign language. From 2022 to 2025, he participated in the Erasmus+ project “Plurilingual Phraseology: Learning Multiword Units Through English.” Since 2025, he has been a member of the Executive Board of the European Society for Phraseology (EUROPHRAS).
Kateřina Šichová, University of Regensburg
She studied German language and history education at Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) and Czech philology at the University of Regensburg (Germany), where she also earned a doctorate in linguistics from the Department of German Studies. She currently teaches Czech at the Bohemicum – Center for Czech Studies at the University of Regensburg. Her work there also focuses on the didactics of Czech as a foreign and heritage language, as well as on the teaching of cultural studies, translation, and audiovisual translation. In her publications and lectures, she focuses on phraseology, sociolinguistics, the language of advertising, and the didactics of Czech as a foreign and heritage language.
Dennis Tark, University of Rostock
Dr. Dennis Tark is a research associate in German language and literature education at the University of Rostock, with a focus on primary education. His work centers on German as a second language (DaZ), multilingualism, and language acquisition in migration contexts. He is particularly interested in the role of aesthetic and narrative approaches to language learning, as well as teaching and learning in out-of-school contexts. His current research explores storytelling as a principle for sustainable language development in multilingual settings. In his teaching, he is involved in the professionalization of prospective primary school teachers, especially in the areas of language-sensitive instruction and research-based learning.