Idiomaticitatea şi expresiile idiomatice în italiană şi română
Idiomaticity and Pure Idioms in Italian and Romanian

Summary/Abstract: As a new linguistic field, phraseology still has to clarify important aspects such as the distinction between the different types of phraseological units, amongst which the pure idioms. In order to find out what a pure idiom is, I tried first to identify what the concept of idiomaticity refers to. After analysing the two types of idiomaticity (interlinguistic and intralinguistic idiomaticity) I reached the conclusion that even though different linguists define this concept in different ways, they all mention at least some of the following features: specificity, untranslatability, fixity, semantic unity, expressiveness, non-compositionality, semantic transfer. In my opinion, idiomaticity refers to the semantic dimension of phraseological units, and consists of three main aspects: non-compositionality of meaning, semantic fusion and semantic transfer. Since these aspects can have different degrees of intensity in different idioms, idiomaticity turns out to be a scalary concept: the maximum degree of idiomaticity is reached by pure idioms, which are the result of a metaphorical process and are characterized by a totally non-compositional meaning, a higher degree of semantic fusion and a significant change of the initial meaning of all their constituents.

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