¿SE SACÓ DE ONDA O SE LO LLEVÓ LA TOSTADA? IDIOMS REFERRING TO EMOTIONS IN MEXICAN SPANISH

Abstract

Over 100 idioms and collocations with verbal functions that refer to an emotional event in standard Mexican Spanish were collected in order to build a systematic catalog thereof. Individual entries were sorted based on their syntactic and semantic characteristics. The sequences analyzed were clustered together into several patterns: six constructional types were identified according to their form, while two metaphoric and three metonymic schemes were found according to the semantic means used. Besides its lexicographic descriptive value, this study set the grounds for an effective methodology to analyze a higher number of phrases of this semantic field. Phraseology studies like this are particularly useful for corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, as well as in teaching Mexican Spanish as a second language (L2).