In Search of Phraseologies: Discovering Divergences in the Use of English and Italian True Friends

This article is situated at the crossroads between contrastive linguistics and phraseology. Its objective is to show how some characteristic elements of the co-text of supposedly true friends in English and Italian form different phraseological patterns which account for (un)suspected semantic and pragmatic divergences in their use. Some pairs of true friends, which are supposed to share the same meaning and use in the two languages, have been analysed in two broadly comparable corpora. Findings shed new light on the web of linguistic, cultural and pragmatic relations occurring beneath the lexical level: they ultimately explain why the cognate words analysed often turn out not to be translational equivalents of each other. The same corpus-based approach could prove helpful in analysing similar phenomena in other pairs of languages.