Motivation and Etymology of Phraseological Units in English and Albanian Language

Abstract

“The notion of phraseology implies much more than inventories of idioms and systems of lexical patterns. Phraseology is a dimension of language use in which patterns of wording (lexicons- grammatical patterns) encode semantic views of the world, and at a higher level idioms and lexical phrases have rhetorical and textual roles within a specific discourse. Phraseology is at once a pragmatic dimension of linguistic analysis, and a system of organization which encompasses more local lexical relationships, namely collocation and lexicon grammar” (Gledhill 2000, p.202). The reason why I decided to write this paper is the fact that apart from investigating the phraseological units thoroughly, of a great challenge would be the discovery of their meaning, their etymology and their motivation, specifically in the Albanian language, a language which according to the “Fjalorit të sotëm te gjuhës shqipe” – “The Dictionary of the today’s Albanian language”, over 50% of the word have more than one meaning, i.e. they are poly-semantic words. On the other hand we have the English language which is spoken by 400 million people as a mother tongue and it is a worldwide international language where phraseological units play an integral part of the language .In this paper we aim to see the similarities and the differences between the two languages.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n1p189