Metatextual indicators and phraseological units in an English multimodal corpus: the case of know what they say
Abstract
Identifying phraseological units is not always an easy task, especially when immediate oral decoding is needed. This is often the case with interpreting. Phraseological units, however, may at times occur accompanied by a metatextual introducer, which may help the interpreter determine when there is a phraseological unit present in a given excerpt.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the usage of the metatextual indicator you know what they say in real spoken situations. After analyzing the 100 most recent occurrences of this metatextual indicator in the NewsScape corpus, it is possible to argue that you know what they say tends to be used with phraseological units, more specifically and in descending order with proverbs and quotes. This indicator is almost exclusively located before the phraseological unit. Additionally, some occurrences of phraseological units appear divided into different speaking turns — and, sometimes, even with the intervention of more than one speaker. Lastly, it is necessary to highlight the great number of modifying procedures within phraseological units when analyzing the occurrences taken from the corpus.
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