Albanian Phraseology in Its Narrow and Broad Sense

Abstract

Besides phraseology in a narrow sense there is also another type of phraseology that we accept and which we propose for the Albanian language as well. It is phraseology in the broad sense which does not exclude phraseology in the narrow sense, but includes it as one of its main categories. By phraseology in the narrow sense we mean phraseology that studies phrasemes below the sentence level. By phraseology in the broad sense we mean phraseology that studies phrasemes up to the sentence level, such as proverbs and phraseological conversation formulae. The distinguishing condition of phraseology in the broad sense from phraseology in the narrow sense is sentence equivalence, a conception that most European phraseology researchers agree on today. The determining criteria we propose for phraseology in the broad sense as well as for phraseology in the narrow sense is non-literal referentiality, which means that the constituents of a phraseological sequence have lost their literal meanings and the phraseological sequence has a transferred meaning. It doesn’t matter how many words with a transferred meaning there are within a fixed phraseological multi-word sequence; even a single word with a transfeered meaning can change the meaning of a fixed multi-word combination, such as jetë qeni (dog’s life), thyej rekordin (break a record), mjaltë i ëmbël (lit. honey sweet, for very sweet), pendë i lehtë (lit. feather light, for very light), çelës anglez (lit. English key, for adjustable wrench), etc.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n4p338