La enseñanza de las unidades fraseológicas desde la lingüística cognitiva

Abstract

Recent years have seen a considerable increase in both theoretical studies and teaching proposals for the learning of phraseological units in the field of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). However, more research is required still to improve methodological procedures and optimize pedagogical practices. This doctoral thesis is theoretical as well as applied in nature, and investigates Spanish phraseological units, more specifically Spanish idioms, from the perspective of Cognitive linguistics. The first chapter offers a general overview of phraseologisms and their main properties according to the tenets of Cognitive linguistics. The second chapter proposes a set of recommended guidelines for the teaching of phraseological units in general and provides specific directions based on a Cognitive linguistics approach to be implemented in teaching practices. The third chapter presents the analysis of a corpus of 76 Spanish idioms which are all related to speaking, and it does so from a Cognitive linguistics perspective. It describes the figurative foundations of the idioms at hand and classifies them according to the metaphors and metonymies underlying them. This analysis is complemented by a second analysis that contrasts the Spanish idioms with their translation equivalents in English. This allows us to distribute the Spanish and English units in four groups based on the degree of similarity/difference between their figurative base and formal make-up. On the basis of this analysis, 20 Spanish idioms were selected from the corpus to conduct an experimental study aiming to prove the effectiveness of a Cognitive linguistics-inspired teaching proposal. The experimental design and the main findings of this experiment are then reported in the fourth and last chapter. The thesis ends with a conclusion, the bibliographic references and several appendices containing the corpus of Spanish idioms, their English equivalents, and the various materials used in the experiment.