Some remarks on cultural connotations of urbanonyms and idiomacity in a contrastive perspective Urbanonyms, such as street names, square names and names of other places in the city, can carry cultural connotations, which is of great importance in a contrastive perspective. Some urbanonyms have connotations of universal character, while the connotations of others are of national or local character. The typology of cross-linguistic equivalents of urbanonyms carrying cultural connotations is presented and discussed. The knowledge of connotations of proper names including urbonyms is part of being bilingual and bicultural. The connotative potential of urbanonyms requires a proper lexicographic description which is vital in foreign lanaguge teaching and translation.
It is common to state that idioms represent a major challenge in learning and use face to free speech words units. However, there are difficulty degrees when it comes to idiom meaning processing. This article aims to answer the question of why there are idioms that it takes a hard work to motivate, whereas there are others that, whatever their familiarity or context dependence, are immediately interiorized and understood. Operating with the cognitive notions of image and particularly with its level of abstraction and concretization, global or individual reading, direct or indirect and contiguity and similarity linking, this paper suggest a four-level scale based on cognitive effort in motivating and understanding idioms.
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