A study of emic proportions: contextualising phraseological false friends

Abstract

The discipline of phraseology covers a wide variety of topics relating to the structure and usage of phraseological units. These units of language carry cultural meanings which are reproduced within their own cultural context. Among the different types of phraseological units are false friends. False friends are lexical or phraseological units that take a similar or identical form in two or more languages, but which vary semantically. False friends are deeply intertwined with the context in which they are created. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the importance of the relationship between text and context in the study of phraseological false friends using an emic approach. The findings outline the need for context to be emphasised in the production of dictionaries containing phraseological false friends. The study of these deceptive phraseological units has implications for contrastive analysts, curriculum designers, foreign language teachers and students, philologists,translation theorists, translators, as well as phraseographers and phraseologists.