Unidades fraseológicas da língua inglesa: uma análise comparativa diacrônica e diatópica

Abstract

This research deals with English Idioms (EIs) as Phraseological Units (UFs) in accordance, mainly, with the line of theoretical methodological research of Martins (2020), as well as that of Corpas Pastor (1996), García -Page Sánchez (2008), Penadés Martinez (1999), Ruiz Gurillo (2001) and Zuluaga (1980). Based on the definitions of the essential elements that govern them — polylexicality, frequency, conventionality, fixation, idiomaticity and opacity —, our objective was to analyze, from the diachronic and diatopic perspectives and with the help of corpora, whether there was variation in the pattern of use of these expressions in the English language, between the 19th and the 21st century, and between the British and American variants. The methodology used was based on a corpus of UFs previously created by Freitas (2020), which includes English literary works. Due to its quantitative limitation, it was expanded here with the help of a code in Python, whose function was to locate and highlight additional EIs for the corpus. Based on this, the UFs were compared with data on language use obtained from four corpora: i) the Corpus of Historical English, here representing 19th century American English; ii) the Corpus of Contemporary English, which consists of samples of the same variant, but from the 21st century; iii) the Hansard British Corpus, representative of 19th century British English; and iv) the British National Corpus, composed of texts from the British variant of the 21st century. It was established as a hypothesis that the diachronic variation found would be smaller in relation to the diatopic one, since a period of time such as the one analyzed here, which encompasses only two centuries, prototypically does not present such discrepant linguistic alterations. This limitation was outlined by the corpora found, whose oldest text dates from 1803. From a diatopical perspective, it was concluded that EIs are more frequent in American English than in British English. In the diachronic perspective, it was found that the UFs were more used in the 19th century in contrast to the 21st century. Regarding the comparison between the literary works and the corpora, it was verified that the frequency of EIs is significantly higher in the analyzed books than in the selected corpora.