Analysis of Prepositional Phrases in Italian Civil Law of Obligations: A Documentary and Didactic Tool.

Abstract

Phraseology can often be a difficult subject for translators who work with specialized texts and lack effective resources to find equivalents, or even to identify the structure of the diverse specialized phraseological units (SPUS). This happens mainly in written legal texts that use numerous formulaic expressions. In accordance, this study undertakes a corpus analysis through which a compendium of prepositional phrases found in the Title IV of the Italian Civil Code of Obligations was compiled. These SPUS were categorized into three main groups according to the syntactic patterns of their structure. This paper presents the main findings of a research carried out to describe prepositional phrases and their frequencies within the corpus, in addition to some examples of their usage. The aim of this work is to propose the compendium’s utility as a didactic resource, and a documentation tool for translators and other language professionals with an interest in prepositional phrases, particularly in Italian.