Some lexical, grammatical and functional features of phraseological units in English and Albanian

Abstract

The task of defining what an idiomatic expression is remains still a rather difficult one. The border between literal and idiomatic expressions is still controversial. The difficulty in defining phraseological unitss is due to several factors. Current treatment of phraseology in specialised registers acknowledges the need for corpus-based studies of the prototypical lexico-grammatical patternings and discourse functions of lexical phrases across disciplines. Thus, the aim of this paper is to deal with some lexical, grammatical and functional features of phraseological units in order to understand their nature and to deal with idiomatization as a process. More precisely, this research study intends to explore prototypical lexico-grammatical features and patterns of phraseological units in English and Albanian. This analysis is based entirely on corpus evidence, since all collocational patterns discussed are extracted mainly from literary texts in both languages, specifically compiled for the current research study.