DIATOPIC VARIATION OF THE ZOOMORPHIC PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN CUBAN AND COLOMBIAN SPANISH

Abstract

This study contributes to the diatopic description of Hispano-American phraseology. It was developed within the research lines of the Phraseology and Multilingual Translation Group (FRASYTRAM), the Phraseology Study Group of Cuba (GEFRASCU) and the Lexical Corpus of Colombian Spanish (CorlexCo). Its objective is to analyze the phraseological variation from a sample of 75 zoomorphisms currently in use in Cuba and Colombia. It exposes, in turn, the most representative types of variants and how each country expresses, through zoonyms, human characteristics and behaviors. For this, zoomorphisms have been selected from corpora built for two doctoral theses in progress; some idioms have been extracted from regional, phraseological and general dictionaries; others from the CorlexCo, and others have been obtained through questionnaires and websites. The comparative analysis allowed us to verify which expressions are part of the phraseological system of both countries and which are used as lexical, morphological, syntactic or phonetic variants. It was also found that, although many of the zoomorphisms used in Cuba and Colombia have their origin in general Spanish, each country has developed its own phraseological system based on its cultural realities and idiosyncrasies.