Ricerc@Sapienza

Alcuni usi di verbi francesi frequenti nella parola formale scritta ("tenir à", "avoir à", "revenir à") si presentano come espressioni fisse anche se non tipiche della caegoria. Le teorie linguistiche riguardanti i fenomeni di cristallisazzione per la lingua francese concordano nel riconoscere l'esistenza di un doppio vincolo operativo a livello del significato e del significante e assumono inoltre che la forma fissa risultante possa collocarsi in un range che spazia dal sintagma binare alla frase.

What is phraseology and what role does it play in second language teaching and learning? What is the relationship between the production of phraseo- logical units and the strategies governing their comprehension? Are the cognitive processes that allow the learning and production of phraseological units holistic or are they the result of the combinatory sum of single units of meaning? Is it possible to measure the complexity of a phraseological unit and create useful pa- rameters both for the development of language learning resources and for phra- seological competence testing?

This paper focuses on the way the idioms in Italo Calvino’s first novel (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947) were translated in the two extant German editions of the book: Heinz Riedt’s (1965) and the one published in 1992 under the pen name of Thomas Kolberger. To this end, 122 differently translated phraseological units (including idioms, collocations and formulas) were singled out for comparison, resulting in 9 distinct typologies (i.e., phraseological types supported with examples).