Phraseology in the FLE Class: Inner Structure of the Lexical Meaning and Use of Phrases

Abstract

The development of corpus linguistics and tools for automatic language processing over the last twenty years has highlighted the importance of phraseology in all kinds of discourse, on the one hand, and enabled the development of programs necessary for modelling the lexicon, on the other. In that context, non-free multiword lexical units have been the subject of several studies in the area of language teaching and, in particular, the teaching of foreign languages. This article offers a continuation of that research based on our practical experience as teachers of FLE at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, taking strong idioms (Mel’?uk, 2008) as our object of study. Our aim is to determine whether the definitions for this kind of lexical item that appear in general dictionaries and in learner’s dictionaries offer the necessary information to guarantee the correct use of the idiom and, ultimately, to propose new lexicographical descriptions which could prove more effective for our students.