Phraseology at the intersection of grammar, culture and statistics

• Published in: Yearbook of Phraseology
• Main Author: Colson, Jean-Pierre
• Other Authors: UCL - SSH/ILC/PLIN - Pôle de recherche en linguistique, UCL - SSH/ILC - Institut Langage et Communication
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Walterde Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 2016
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/179670; https://doi.org/10.1515/phras-2016-0001

Phraseology is deeply rooted in culture and history. The clear implication is that phraseology should take into account the amazing diversity of languages and cultures. Although there is no complete agreement on the ranking of the most spoken languages of the world, Chinese (Mandarin), English, Spanish and Hindi are often cited as the four most spoken languages, and we should never forget that three of them are Indo-European languages, probably sharing many common phraseological features. If phraseology is to become a theory, or if we wish to make claims about the theoretical underpinnings of phraseological hypotheses, they should not only be tested against English and other European languages, but against very different languages selected from the whole palette of linguistic diversity, from the very agglutinating Inuit languages at one extreme, to the most isolating languages at the other end, with for instance Chinese languages and Vietnamese.