Phraseology in children’s literature: a contrastive analysis

This dissertation investigates Dutch and Italian phraseology in a corpus of Children’s Literature. Phraseological units notoriously pose challenges for both translators and language learners. However, the presence and nature of phraseological units in lower language proficiency levels have received very little attention. As both authors and translators of children’s books base their linguistic choices, and their phraseological choices specifically, on the assumptions they have of the still limited linguistic, phraseological, and cultural knowledge of their young receivers, Children’s Literature could be a source for a core phraseological inventory. Through a contrastive, bidirectional analysis of phraseological units and their translatants (Dutch↔Italian), a first attempt is made to evaluate if Children’s Literature (CL) could prove a fruitful corpus for identifying a core phraseological inventory. Furthermore, the similarities and differences between the phraseological inventories of the two languages involved are explored, and the translational equivalence between phraseological units and their translatants is examined.