The phraseological units of Le Petit Nicolas short stories in bilingual French / Portuguese dictionaries

Abstract

Phraseology studies (BOLLY, 2011; MONTEIRO-PLANTIN, 2017) point out that foreign speakers of a given language demonstrate greater difficulty in understanding the global meaning of phraseological units (PU), even knowing the individual meaning that is usually used in each lexia that compose them. A good example of this is in the understanding of the PUs present in the short stories in the children’s book collection Le Petit Nicolas, commonly used as reading paradidactic during French Foreign Language (FFE) classes. Research indicates that most foreign language students at initial levels make use of bilingual dictionaries to resolve doubts about the vocabulary of the foreign language in learning (ZUCCHI, 2010a). In previous works (SAMPAIO; RIBEIRO, 2018), we observed that, although idioms have gained some attention from bilingual and/or phraseological dictionaries in Brazil, the other types of PUs are not included in such lexicographic works, which possibly increases the complexity of reading. Thus, the present work sought to identify and catalog the PUs present in the aforementioned series, so that one could better ascertain the dictionary in bilingual lexicographic works most frequently consulted by French apprentices in Brazil. Five dictionaries were consulted (two for general use and three for phraseology). For this article, the corpus was limited to the tales from the first book in the series. The results showed that the bilingual French dictionaries in Brazil still lack attention regarding the presence of PUs.