A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH THE LEXICAL ITEM „HEART” IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN LEXICAL CORPUSES

Abstract

This article aims at representing the lexical corpus of English and Albanian languages with the lexical unit „heart”. As idioms with body parts constitute one of the most important sources in both languages, idioms with „heart” are part of this category. Through a contrastive analysis of the semantics and structure of the idiomatic expressions, this study sought to explore similar or/and identical and different structures in both languages. To achieve the aim of this paper data are drawn from the Albanian phraseological dictionary of J. Thomai (218 uni ts with heart) and more than 100 idiomatic expressions are extracted from the English lexical corpus mainly from two dictionaries. Through an empirical study of their underlying conceptual metaphors, phraseological units are also analyzed in terms ofthe cu lture and mentality of both nations.

Keywords

• Heart
• semantics
• structure
• contrastive analysis
• phraseological unit
• culture dimension