Phraseological units in the Chilean variant of Spanish: lexicological and lingua-cultural approaches

Abstract

The theme of the linguistic, cultural and historical peculiarities of the national variants of Spanish is acquiring importance. The study of the thematic system of phraseological units (PU) reconstructs the national linguistic image of the world. Every concrete example of PU exposes the specific ethnolinguistic character of the metaphorical imagining and presents the material for the investigation from the lingua-cultural approach.The “chilenisms” are the target of our study phraseological. The analysis focuses in the synonymy and homonymy, changes phraseological. As the problems of the change and the border of the diffusion of locutions in different areas are not examined sufficiently neither equally, also that the thematic national idioms field is very dynamic and diverse, we realized also the survey of native speakers of the Chilean variant concerning the semantics and the connotations of PU, which indicate that many PU considered “chilenisms” in the lexicological dictionaries of the 80s of the XXth century are unknown or obsolescent, at the same time there are many that do not consist in the dictionaries. Summing up, the realized analysis demonstrates the urgent need to develop – to renew and to deepen – the lexicographical sources.

Keywords

• lingua-cultural approach
• phraseological unit
• semantic derivation
• latinoamericanism
• regionalism
• variantism
• chilenism