Ricerc@Sapienza

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? These are some of the research questions that have recently led an increasing number of scholars, at a national and international level and from a range of different fields, to approach the phenomenon of phraseology from a variety of epistemological perspectives (linguistic, neuro-psycholinguistic, pedagogical), and investigate it with different but complementary research tools.