A contrastive semantic analysis of English, Spanish and French idioms

Abstract

Idiomatic expressions have been vastly researched in the last years (Corpas, Manual; González Rey; Boers and Stengers, "Quantitative"; "Adding"). Many studies have approached idioms from a cross-linguistic perspective (Awwad; Dobrovol'skij, "Phraseological"; "Idioms"; Corpas, Lenguas; Dobrovol'skij and Piirainen), highlighting the similarities between idioms from different languages. The present paper seeks to contribute to cross-linguistic idiom analysis. We aim to conduct research into the English, Spanish and French idiomatic repertoires in order to find out both similarities and differences. We will concentrate on the semantic specifics of idioms on the basis of the hypothesis that the identity, similarity or divergence of idioms is largely grounded on the plane of content.