Blanco sobre negro/svart á hvítu: Color Phraseology in Icelandic and Spanish

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze a corpus of phraseological units (PU) containing colours in Spanish and Icelandic. This study, which belongs to the field of Contrastive Phraseology, tackles differences and similarities within a semantic field that is full of symbolism but also cultural-historical background. The PU were taken from phraseological dictionaries and filtered by their frequency and validity in modern day language with linguistic corpora. We followed a taxonomy adapted by Suárez (2005, 2006) from the Ukrainian phraseology studies. This taxonomy is based on the morphosyntactic and semantic correspondences among linguistic systems. The results were organized into degrees, going from full to zero equivalence. We also present a file template where all relevant information of each PU is collected. The outcomes are suitable for lexicographic and didactic purposes. On the one hand, the correspondences can be included in a new general bilingual dictionary and the research can be broadened with other semantic fields such as body parts and animals. On the
other hand, a phraseological repertoire of both languages can be used in the Spanish as a foreign language classroom in Iceland.