Las modificaciones fraseológicas en los titulares españoles
Phraseological modifications in Spanish headlines

Summary/Abstract: The study of phraseological modifications represents a research challenge as a result of the difficulties that conceptual premises and the compilation process pose. Nevertheless, these units are a widespread phenomenon, especially in certain textual types, which is why their exploration is crucial. The aim of this paper is to describe the use of phraseological modifications in Spanish online headlines. This empirical exploratory study has been carried out with an ad hoc corpus compiled from systematic searches during approximately one month in six Spanish online journals. The corpus consists of 286 headlines, 82 with modified phraseological units and 204 with canonical phraseological units. This article presents the results regarding the types of phraseological units and the types of modifications found. These results reveal the importance of this creative variation of phraseology in this textual type, as it is used in 28.3% of the corpus. Significantly enough, it was possible to find modifications in all types of units (collocations, idioms, proverbs, winged words, and pragmatic phraseological units). The use of phraseological modifications is therefore consolidated as a recurrent tool in the type of text analysed, magazines headlines, although in different forms and applied to very different types of units. However, the problems that arise from the identification of the canonical unit point to the need for further refinement of the distinction between canonical and modified forms.

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