Obra ressenyada: Fanny MEUNIER ; Sylviane GRANGER, Phraseology in foreign language teaching and learning. Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008

Buckingham, Louisa

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136    Language Design 10 desde el punto de vista semántico, por no hablar de la derivación intrafraseológica? (tomar el pelo vs tomadura de pelo). El noveno y último capítulo, en concordancia con la definición de partida, está dedicado al estudio comparativo de las informaciones metafraseográficas que se encuentran en los prólogos de los diccionarios analizados, y, a modo de conclusión, se establece un resumen para atar cabos, algo muy saludable dados los meandros del hilo conductor del libro a causa de la diversidad de opiniones y estrategias acerca de cada punto.              La obra ofrece en su conjunto un excelente panorama sincrónico de nuestra fraseografía, muy detallado, bien ordenado, con una capacidad de observación y de síntesis admirables. Por otra parte, su vertiente aplicada la hace útil para el fraseógrafo y atractiva para el principiante.   Antonio Pamies Universidad de Granada   *****   MEUNIER, Fanny & GRANGER, Sylviane: 2008 Phraseology in foreign language teaching and learning. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company (259 pp.) ISBN 978 90 272 3244 1.    This publication forms part of a series of three texts emanating from the 2005 conference on phraseology in Louvain. It brings together eleven papers from well known scholars, whose studies contribute to the modest but growing body of research on the place of phraseology in applied linguistics. As a collection, the contributions cover topics relating to the selection of phraseological units, their acquisition and their inclusion in didactic materials.  After an immensely readable overview by Nick Ellis on the place of phraseology in various approaches to language acquisition, the first section focuses on issues concerning the identification of relevant phraseological units for didactic purposes. In his analysis of semantic preferences of eight high frequency verbs, Graeme Kennedy’s contribution questions the widely held belief regarding the arbitrary nature of collocates.  Book Reviews and Notices    137 He shows how some verbs display a strong tendency to combine with particular verb forms (e.g. the gerund), or collocates with a positive or negative connotation, or with collocates from a particular semantic group (e.g. give + communication nouns). Kennedy shows that even delexicalised verbs (such as make, do and give) may display such collocational preferences. Susanne Handl examines the importance of collocational direction and the different degrees of attraction which collocates may exert on each other. Her study extends previous work by Stubbs (Two quantitative methods of studying phraseology in English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 7/2, 2002, 215-243) and Sinclair (Corpus, concordance, collocation. O.U.P 1991) on the asymmetrical relation between a collocation’s components. Handl proposes that dictionaries incorporate some form of distinguishing between collocates’ differing degrees of mutual attraction.    The final three studies in this section focus on deviations from native speaker norms in learner writing. John Osbourne studies the occurrence of apparently simple errors (such as third person singular verb conjugation or adjectives with a plural marker etc.) in written learner texts and reveals the extent to which such relatively simple oversights by advanced learners are triggered by the text’s degree of phraseological complexity. Joanne Neff van Aertselaer presents the results of a contrastive study (English-Spanish) on the use of interpersonal expressions (such as clearly, it is possible/ likely/ necessary etc.) by novice and expert text writers. The author documents instances of overuse or underuse of the forms studied (which she attributes to native language interference) and she considers how some deviations may affect the overall tone of the student’s text. Magli Paquot investigates the rhetorical function of exemplification in an academic writing learner corpus, contrasting the prepositional phrases for instance and for example with the verbs to illustrate and to exemplify. Her results show that learner’s of English tend to overuse prepositional phrases, while other means of expressing the same rhetorical function (such as X exemplifies Y or X is an example of Y) are rarely employed. The author posits that multiword units with a rhetorical function are likely to be more easily transferred.   The second section deals with issues involved in learning and teaching phraseological units. The first contribution from Alison Wray and Tess Fitzpatrick deals with the role of memorization in learning phraseological units. The authors posit that learner performance when 138    Language Design 10 producing previously memorised formulaic language can potentially be used for the purposes of evaluating linguistic competency, as the types of learner deviations from the native speaker norm provide information on a learner’s level of morphosyntactic and lexical competence. Averil Coxhill considers issues related to teaching phraseological units. She suggests that one reason for learners’ avoidance of phraseological language may be fear of being accused of plagiarism. David Wible exposes the limitations of existing didactic reference materials for learning phraseological expressions, and presents types of digital resources and tools which can support learner’s ongoing acquisition of phraseological units.   The third and final section is devoted to didactic materials. Dirk Siepmann and Mojca Pecman consider the relative use of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries as learning aids. While Siepmann favours the onomasiological approach to lexicography, Pecman explores how an electronic dictionary can allow learners to access collocational information from both an onomasiological and semasiological perspective. Pecman strongly favours designing didactic materials (in this case, dictionaries) for subgenres such as scientific academic writing, due to the specific style conventions and phraseological information which words often have within a specific domain. Céline Gouverneur examines the presentation of the phraseological uses of the two high frequency verbs make and take in learner textbooks. She concludes that insufficient explicit focus on “simple” verbs such as these may be one of the factors which cause proficient learners to continue to experience problems with them.   The book concludes with the editors’ suggestions for further research, which highlight the main themes addressed in each section. As a whole, the book makes a very worthwhile contribution to the discussion of issues surrounding the incorporation of phraseology into language teaching contexts. Although neither the Louvain conference nor this text was restricted to English, one might query why all studies in this book dealt almost exclusively with the acquisition of English. In the future, one might hope also to see a collection of this standard dedicated to the acquisition of phraseological units in a broad variety of languages.   Louisa Buckingham Universidad de Victoria 

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