Las locuciones verbales con clítico femenino: observaciones contrastivas entre español e italiano

This chapter aims to present a comparative study of Spanish and Italian verbal idioms with feminine accusative pronoun (e.g. [Sp.] pagarla(s) / [It.] pagarla (cara), [Sp.] pirárselas / [It.] filarsela and [Sp.] buscárselas / [It.] cercarsela). Casares devoted a section of his famous Introducción a la lexicografía moderna (1950) to this kind of units, in which he pointed out that it is not always easy to interpret the pronoun present in them. Later studies have also highlighted the difficulties that these idioms pose for non-native speakers. However, the existing literature still lacks comparative research focusing on the features of these units. With the aim of contributing to fill this gap, in the following pages I first describe the parameters adopted for the selection of the bilingual corpus under investigation. Subsequently, I will examine some of the results obtained with regard to the formal and semantic features of the idioms collected, and, finally, I will outline some points of re-thinking for the future development of this research line.