Spanish comparative constructional idioms and their English and French counterparts: a corpus-based study

Abstract

This investigation proposes a corpus-based approach to the study of comparative constructional idioms in Spanish and their counterparts in English and French. Under the view that phraseological comparisons can be best analysed as a type of constructional idiom, this study aims at describing these semi-schematic patterns as productive phenomena – both by means of type frequency and analogical extensions –and in relation to grammatical comparisons –formally equivalent constructions may be interrelated in the construction by means of family resemblance relationships. With the OPUS2 Spanish parallel corpus of Sketch Engine, we aim at examining the translation of the [más feo que X], [feo como X], [más tonto que X] and [tonto como X] constructional idioms, paying special attention to translation techniques as well as constructional counterparts