Journal: Espaces linguistiques & John Benjamins, Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts
Issue: English Phraseology in Contrast
Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2025

Call for contributions to collective publications: English Phraseology in Contrast

A contrastive approach to English phraseology is essential to identify and describe the specificities of its lexicogrammar, imagery, and figurative and formulaic language. This call for papers invites scholars interested in exploring contrastive phraseology and phraseotranslation. We welcome papers focusing on English collocations, idioms and other fixed phrases, conversational formulae, and proverbs as well as phraseological patterns with open slots and other phraseological constructions in contrast or in comparison with other languages.
This call for papers represents the culmination of the three-year research project The peculiarities of the phraseology of English from a contrastive perspective, whose main objective has been to identify idioms that are specific to English or, at least, that make English stand out from the rest of the European and other world languages. Other aims included the search for similarities and differences between phraseological equivalents across languages on the morphosyntactic, semantic, metaphorical, and pragmatic levels and the ways in which languages express different concepts or conceptual domains by means of idiomatic expressions.
The contrastive analysis of English phraseology pursues the retrieval of the images that are shared by English and many other languages, such as sword of Damocles or give the green light (Piirainen 2012, 2016) as well as those that are specific to English or shared by all or most Germanic languages. However, it is of fundamental importance that the analysis be carried out within the frame of a specific theoretical model (Colson 2008).
Corpus-based cross-linguistic analysis of multi-word units (Andersen 2019, 2022; Colson 2012; Corpas Pastor 2021; Cotta Ramusino & Mollica 2020; Dobrovol’skij & Piirainen 2021; Hallsteinsdóttir & Farø 2010) has become pervasive thanks to the general access and use of both parallel and comparable corpora, which allows a detailed description of various linguistic phenomena as well as empirical data on differences concerning frequency of use.
Phraseological equivalence is a key field of research in Contrastive Phraseology and especially partial equivalents that are “idioms of L1 and L2 which have identical or near-identical meanings, but do not fully correspond in syntactic and lexical structure, or imagery basis.” (Dobrovol’skij 2000: 372). Widespread idiomatic patterns (Piirainen 2020) together with constructional phrasemes (Dobrovol’skij 2011) represent a major source of inspiration for phraseological contrastive analysis. Other lines of research include the pragmatic differences between equivalent multi-word conversational routines in two or more languages focusing on their contextual and functional properties or the links between contrastive phraseology and translation. Studies can also enquire into the degree of comparability of English idioms and proverbs and their equivalents in other languages concerning their frequency of use, semantics, and context of use from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective as well as the functional equivalence in other languages of English idioms and proverbs as they are used in authentic texts compared to their lexicographic descriptions.
We invite contributions on applied and theoretical topics mainly in the framework of cognitive linguistics. Idiomatic expressions are the reflection of the history, culture and cognition concerning the imagery, the figurativeness and the metaphorical and metonymical processes of each language. The types and the cognitive links between source and target domains within one language and in comparison with others represent a major challenge of analysis in contrastive phraseology. Other possible approaches include construction grammar, corpus linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, semantics, pragmatics, cultural studies, and language teaching and learning.

Submissions
Submissions will include an abstract of 3,000 to 4,000 characters (without spaces) as well as four or five keywords and references. All abstracts will be anonymously peer-reviewed by an international scientific board. Abstracts must be written in English.
Please send your abstracts to the three editors, Ramon Marti Solano ([email protected]), Alicja Witalisz ([email protected]) and Gisle Andersen ([email protected]).
Abstracts may be rejected, accepted subject to revision, or accepted as such, the resulting selection will appear in two publications, a collective volume (John Benjamins, Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts) and a special issue of the open access journal Espaces linguistiques.

Deadlines
• 1 September 2025 – Deadline for submitting abstracts
• 30 November 2025 – Notification to authors
• 1 May 2026 – Deadline for submitting first draft of manuscripts

References
Andersen, Gisle. 2019. Phraseology in a cross-linguistic perspective: Introducing the diachronic-contrastive corpus method, Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 20: Corpus Approaches into World Englishes and Language Contrasts, at https://varieng.helsinki.fi/series/volumes/20/andersen/.
Andersen, Gisle. 2022. Phraseology in a cross-linguistic perspective: A diachronic and corpus-based account. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 18 (2): 365-389. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2019-0057
Colson, Jean-Pierre. 2012. Phraséologie contrastive et linguistique de corpus: outils récents et perspectives. In Antonio Pamies, José Manuel Pazos Bretaña & Lucía Luque Nadal (eds), Phraseology and Discourse : Cross-Linguistic and Corpus-Based Approaches. Schneider Verlag Hohengehren: Baltmannsweiler. 1-9.
Colson, Jean-Pierre. 2008. Cross-linguistic phraseological studies. An overview. In Sylviane Granger & Fanny Meunier (eds), Phraseology. An interdisciplinary perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 191-206.
Corpas Pastor, Gloria. 2021. Constructional idioms of ‘insanity’ in English and Spanish: A corpus-based study, Lingua 254, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024384120302217.
Cotta Ramusino, Paola & Fabio Mollica (eds). 2020. Contrastive phraseology: languages and cultures in comparison. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Dobrovol’skij, Dmitri. 2000. Idioms in contrast: a functional view. In Gloria Corpas Pastor (ed.) Las lenguas de Europa: estudios de fraseología, fraseografía y traducción. Granada: Comares. 367-388.
Dobrovol’skij, Dmtri. 2011. Phraseologie und Konstruktionsgrammatik. In Alexander Lasch & Alexander Ziem (eds.), Konstruktionsgrammatik III. Aktuelle Fragen und Lösungsansätze, Tübingen: Stauffenburg. 111–130.
Dobrovol'skij, Dmitrij & Elisabeth Piirainen. 2021. Figurative Language: Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives. 2nd Edition, revised and updated. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
Hallsteinsdóttir, Erla & Ken Farø. 2010. Interlinguale Phraseologie, Yearbook of Phraseology 1, 125-158.
Piirainen, Elisabeth. 2020. Widespread idioms and widespread idiomatic patterns: results for phraseology and related disciplines. In Fabio Mollica & Paola Cotta Ramusino (eds.), Contrastive phraseology: languages and cultures in comparison. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Piirainen, Elisabeth. 2016. Lexicon of Common Figurative Units. New York: Peter Lang.
Piirainen, Elisabeth. 2012. Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond: Toward a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units. New York: Peter Lang.

For further references both in English and in other European languages, see the International Bibliography of Contrastive Phraseology at https://www.unilim.fr/ceres/projets-internationaux/the-peculiarities-of-the-phraseology-of-english-from-a-contrastive-perspective/international-bibliography-of-contrastive-phraseology-references/

Linguistic Field(s): Lexicography
Pragmatics
Sociolinguistics
Text/Corpus Linguistics