(Ir)reversibility of Croatian and Italian Binominals

Abstract

When phraseology first emerged as a scientific discipline, the structural stability of phraseological units was emphasized as one of its most important properties. However, the recent research based on the online corpora suggests that certain properties of phraseological units require a differentiated approach, and while the structural stability is still is one of its inherent properties, it is considered relative, which is why its variability is increasingly emphasised. This applies to all types of phraseological units, including binomials, which are typically characterized by a rigid structure. Binominals are multi-word units, mainly lexicalized, and have a more or less stable structure, which often denotes idiomaticity. Different types of idiom variations, especially lexical ones are one of the characteristics of binomials; but their irreversibility, i.e., topological variation, has not been extensively researched. Despite the shortcomings of the phraseological analysis of binomials, many showed a high degree of reversibility, and the sequence of their components proved to be more inconsistent than previously claimed. Within a given synchronous cross-section, the sequence of many binomial components is reversible, while one sequence is often prioritized. This should be increasingly considered in the phraseographic analyses of binomials. The analysis of the examples extracted from the Italian web corpus itWaC and Croatian hrWac confirms that reversibility is an inherent property of binomials.