Sur un lexique-grammaire comparé d’adverbes figés

SummaryThis paper presents some of the findings which emerged during the construction of a French-Italian lexicon-grammar of frozen adverbs. A French lexicon-grammar compiled by Maurice Gross (1990) was compared with an Italian lexicon-grammar (De Gioia 1994b) with a view to finding semantically equivalent entries for translation purposes. The results showed that 65% of the French entries can be translated with equivalent adverbial and idiomatic expressions in Italian, giving the lie to the traditionally held view that idiomatic expressions are generally untranslatable. A further analysis of cases of semantic and syntactic equivalence showed that the two languages share many families of frozen adverbs, which can be represented by automata and transducers.