Didactic Aspects of Figurative Syntagms in the Teaching Process

Abstract

In the discursive process, figurative phrases with high expressive intensity are frequently used, representing one of the various sources of expression for each speaker in different communicative contexts. However, due to their nature, their teaching at school presents some difficulties. Although they are understandable to a particular linguistic community, they can be incomprehensible or difficult to interpret for anyone learning a foreign language, since their first meaning is in many cases not the meaning of the words that compose them and can be very different from the meaning they acquire in an idiomatic context. Idiomatic expressions rarely have corresponding translations in different languages, and their meaning is often rendered by completely different passages that have nothing in common with their direct meaning. In this article, we have tried to point out some of the methodological aspects to be considered when analyzing texts for didactic purposes and in foreign language teaching when it comes to figurative expressions. Since figurative phrases express a part of a nation’s culture, it is important for students to recognize the syntactic structures as words come together in the discursive process to express and convey thoughts and become part of various meaningful and formal grammatical relationships. They should be learned and acquired by keeping in mind the characteristics of their different types, their density, and their pragmatic use in the respective linguistic community. In this study, we will also try to show that the study of figurative syntagma can shed more light on theories of foreign language acquisition. Previous studies on figurative syntagma in Albanian have mainly been conducted within the narrow confines of linguistics, especially traditional linguistics. We assume that their investigation in the context of language didactics, as we approach it here, is only a first step that needs to be completed and deepened in further and more comprehensive studies.

Received: 28 April 2024 / Accepted: 30 June 2024 / Published: 02 July 2024