THE METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF A ROMANIAN-ENGLISH CONTRASTIVE COLLECTION OF FOOD IDIOMS AND PROVERBS
THE METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF A ROMANIAN-ENGLISH CONTRASTIVE COLLECTION OF FOOD IDIOMS AND PROVERBS

Summary/Abstract: The present paper aims at presenting the research methodological risks for creating a Romanian-English contrastive collection of food idioms and proverbs. This instrument intends to make use of new scientific lexicographical methods in the field of phraseology, providing an answer to the challenge regarding the research strategies of studying language from the perspective of cultural universals. Although the cross-linguistic similarities of idioms according to their cultural foundations seem to gain ground in today's research, phraseological collections are less convincing. In response to the current situation of the onomasiological cross-linguistic corpus of idioms, our Romanian-English contrastive collection of food idioms and proverbs exceeds the perspective of a simple compilation of phrasemes that are separately treated and alphabetically ordered, but organised as organic elements related to a coherent system. We consider that, due to the essential position that food idioms and proverbs hold in the reflection of the mechanisms of language expressivity, compiling a Romanian-English collection is very productive.A contrastive collection of food idioms, will illustrate the main dimensions of the phrasemes which reveal, on the one hand, conceptual structures and metaphorical modes of conceptualizing the world, and, on the other hand, “cultural taxons” based on social interaction, phenomena of material culture, intertextual phenomena, fictive conceptual domains, cultural symbols. The contrastive approach of this project, focusing the attention on Romanian and English language, enables us to answer more precisely various questions concerning the relationship between language and culture and questions regarding potential explanations of cross-linguistic similarities of idioms – be they genetic affiliation, the increasing influence of English upon other languages or the “common European cultural heritage”, as well as to define the theoretical and methodological questions more clearly.This contrastive collection can be a useful research tool for linguists, anthropologists and for the general public interested in the English and Romanian languages, taking into account their expressiveness and documentary significance, which occasions the spotlighting of some fundamental constructs of the European mentality.

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