Frázeologie

Frázeologie, or phraseology, is a branch of linguistics that studies fixed or semi-fixed expressions whose meanings and uses are conventional within a language. The field encompasses idioms, set phrases, collocations, and other phrasal units that function as units of meaning in discourse.

Core concepts include idioms, whose meanings cannot be predicted from the individual words; collocations, where certain words routinely co-occur (for example, strong tea, heavy rain); and fixed expressions, which have limited variation. The umbrella term phraseme covers all such units, including semi-productive forms. Phraseology also investigates metaphor, conventionality, and the role of these expressions in discourse.

Research methods rely on corpus data, specialized dictionaries, and cross-linguistic comparison. Analysts classify items by transparency and fixedness, study their compositionality, and examine how they contribute to idiomaticity, register, and pragmatic meaning. Data sources include idiom dictionaries, phraseological dictionaries, and large corpora, including parallel corpora for translation studies.

Historically, phraseology developed from rhetoric and lexicography and has expanded with corpus linguistics and computational approaches. Its findings are applied in language teaching, lexicography, translation, and natural language processing, where recognizing fixed expressions improves parsing, retrieval, and machine translation.

See also: idiom, collocation, proverb, fixed expression, corpus linguistics.