This paper discusses idiomatic false friends (IFFs) in two genetically unrelated languages, English and Arabic. IFFs are defined as set phrases in two languages that have the same literal meaning but differ as regards their idiomatic meaning or their sociolinguistic and stylistic features. The study proposes a taxonomy for IFFs based on data from English and Arabic, though it may also apply to IFFs in other language pairs. In the case of English and Arabic, IFFs are either related (typically partial) or unrelated (typically total). Related IFFs have their origin in loan-translation, with idioms being borrowed from English into Arabic and then taking a different course of semantic development in each language. There are also cases in which the selection of a single sense of a polysemous idiom can be attributed to social and cultural factors. It is shown that, if idioms in general are among the most challenging units for translators, IFFs can be doubly difficult. The translator may assume that since the source and target language idioms have the same form, they can also have the same meaning or stylistic features.
In contact linguistics, studies on borrowability have tended to focus on morphemes, lexemes, and syntactic structures, while the level of phraseology has not received similar focus, even though the calque of phraseological units represents a wide-spread type of borrowing. Phraseology is an area that shows the deep influence of English on many world languages, including Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The present study aims to find out whether there are common syntactic, semantic, or cultural features that characterise calqued phraseological units and determine their selection as members of the MSA phraseological reservoir. Based on a parallel corpus of MSA phraseological units calqued on English expressions, the study investigates the source units syntactically to find which patterns tend to be borrowed more frequently than others, and analyses them semantically to determine to what extent transparency and decomposability can affect the borrowability of phraseological units. While the findings indicate that there are syntactic and semantic factors that considerably affect phraseological borrowability, the study shows that cultural considerations also play a significant role in the acceptance or rejection of certain expressions by members of the speech community.
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