37.1025, Calls: Neophilologica - "Special Issue: Phraseological Universals in Natural Languages" (Jrnl)
The LINGUIST List
linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Fri Mar 13 12:05:02 UTC 2026
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1025. Fri Mar 13 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 37.1025, Calls: Neophilologica - "Special Issue: Phraseological Universals in Natural Languages" (Jrnl)
Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org
Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>
================================================================
Date: 11-Mar-2026
From: Pawel Golda [pawel.golda at us.edu.pl]
Subject: Neophilologica - "Special Issue: Phraseological Universals in Natural Languages" (Jrnl)
Journal: Neophilologica
Issue: Phraseological Universals in Natural Languages
Call Deadline: 31-May-2026
Thematic Issue of the Journal Neophilologica (No. 38)
Phraseological Universals in Natural Languages
- Editors: Wiesław Banyś, Monika Sułkowska, Paweł Golda, Beata
Śmigielska
- Submission deadline: 31 March 2026 31 May 2026
- Publication date: December 2026
- Maximum article length: 60,000 characters (including spaces)
- Languages of publication: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,
English
- Submissions and author guidelines (mandatory):
https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/NEO/about/submissions
The study of linguistic universals, closely tied to linguistic
typology, seeks to identify features shared across natural languages
despite their diversity (e.g., Comrie, 1989, 2003; Croft, 1990;
Greenberg, 1963, 1969). These universals — traditionally classified as
phono-logical, grammatical, semantic, and symbolic (e.g., Greenberg,
Osgood, Jenkins, 1963) — aim to formalize the invariants of human
language, often in connection with cognition and perception (e.g.,
Coșeriu, 1974; Saffi, 2005; Sułkowska, 2025). While linguistic
typol-ogy focuses on differences between languages, the study of
universals defines their con-straints, delineating the boundaries of
possible variation (e.g., Comrie, 1989, 2003). This line of research,
strongly rooted in Chomsky’s work on universal grammar (1957, 1965),
was initiated by Greenberg (1963), who proposed forty-five syntactic
universals based on a sample of about thirty languages.
In this view, the opposing principles formulated by Jespersen (1971
[1924]) — free combinatorics and fixed combinatorics (Fr. la
combinatoire libre et la combinatoire figée) — which explain the
coexistence of free combinations and phraseological units (i.e.,
non-free multi-word expressions (Mel’čuk, 2013), or phraseologized
syntagmas (Mel’čuk, 2010)), are found in all natural languages, thus
constitute one of the universal facts (e.g., Gréciano, 1991; Gross,
1996; Martin, 2021; Mel’čuk, 2023; Mejri, 2008, 2023). This systemic
universal is key to exploring translinguistic and transcultural
regularities of phraseolog-ical units, which Dobrovol’skij (1988,
1992) named phraseological universals — a term later adopted in other
works (e.g., Gréciano, 1991; Messina Fajardo, 2009; Mejri, 2010;
Kovács, 2015; Hamdane, 2021; Aliyeva, 2025; Sułkowska, 2025).
According to Dobrovol’skij (1992), phraseology must be connected with
other are-as of general linguistics to construct a coherent model of
natural language, justifying the need for continued research into
phraseological universals. This inquiry is further moti-vated by both
practical considerations, e.g., the development of more effective
phrase-odidactics (e.g. Messina Fajardo, 2009; Aliyeva, 2025), and
theoretical exploration.
>From this theoretical standpoint, phraseological universals fall
within the scope of contrastive phraseology (Gréciano, 1991), a field
that has been emerging since the second half of the 20th century
(Chen, 2021). However, for example, Colson (2008) pointed out the
theoretical fragility of comparative studies, which are often limited
to descriptions of fixed expression inventories in different
languages. Research into phraseological univer-sals offers a promising
way to overcome these descriptive limitations and strengthen this
subdiscipline's epistemological foundation. Despite the current
popularity of phra-seology (Mel’čuk, 2013), the topic of
phraseological universals remains largely unex-plored, although it
holds significant theoretical and heuristic potential for comparative
studies (Sułkowska, 2025).
To further develop the notion of phraseological universals and help
fill the cur-rent research gap, Neophilologica — founded in the late
1970s — launches a call for contri-butions on this topic for its
upcoming issue (No. 38). Contributions may address, among other
topics, universal phenomena already observed in phraseological units
across lan-guages (e.g., Messina Fajardo, 2009; Sułkowska, 2025), such
as:
- the expression of emotions or psychological states (e.g., despair,
joy, irony);
- the recurrence of certain lexical classes (e.g., body parts,
animals, natural elements);
- the recurrence of semantic relations such as polysemy, homonymy,
synonymy, or antonymy;
- morphosyntactic or semantic correspondences (absolute or partial)
between phra-seological units across languages;
- the organization of phraseological units into typologically
comparable categories (e.g., proverbs, collocations, pragmatemes) and
- etymological and functional convergence of phraseological
structures.
Beyond the analysis of these phenomena, articles may also:
- identify and define other common features among phrasemes in
diverse languages;
- contribute to the theorization of the concept of phraseological
universals;
- explore the implications of phraseological universality in applied
fields (e.g., lan-guage teaching, lexicography, translation studies);
- examine the limitations and gradational nature of these universals.
Papers must be written in Romance languages or in English and should
rely on contrastive data involving at least one Romance language.
Including languages from other families, in addition to Romance
languages, is also encouraged.
Timeline:
- Article submission deadline: 31 March 2026 31 May 2026
- Peer review feedback: June 2026
- Revised versions due: September 2026
- Issue publication: December 2026
References:
Aliyeva, E. (2025). Phraseological universals and particulars: A
cross-cultural examina-tion of English expressions. Porta Universorum,
1(4), 54–62.
Chen, L. (2021). Analyse comparative des expressions idiomatiques en
chinois et en français rela-tives au corps humain et aux animaux.
Thèse de doctorat, Cergy Paris Université.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.
Colson, J.-P. (2008). Cross-linguistic phraseological studies – An
overview. In S. Granger & F. Meunier (Eds.), Phraseology: An
interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 191–206). John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Comrie, B. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology: Syntax
and morphology. Uni-versity of Chicago Press.
Comrie, B. (2003). On explaining language universals. In M. Tomasello
(Ed.), The new psychology of language (pp. 195–210). Psychology Press.
Coșeriu, E. (1974). Les universaux linguistiques (et les autres). Il
Mulino.
Croft, W. (1990). Typology and universals. Cambridge University Press.
Dobrovol’skij, D. (1988). Phraseologie als Objekt der
Universalienlinguistik. VEB Verlag Enzy-klopädie.
Dobrovol’skij, D. (1992). Phraseological universals: Theoretical and
applied aspects. In M. Kefer & J. Auwera (Eds.), Meaning and grammar:
Cross-linguistic perspectives (pp. 279–301). De Gruyter.
Gréciano, G. (1991). La saisie du polylexème, approche comparative :
français-allemand. L’Information grammaticale, 49, 47–51.
Greenberg, J. H. (1963). Some universals of grammar with particular
reference to the or-der of meaningful elements. In J. H. Greenberg
(Ed.), Universals of language (pp. 73–113). MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. H. (1969). Language universals: A research frontier.
Science, 166, 473–478.
Greenberg, J. H., Osgood, C. E., & Jenkins, J. J. (1963). Memorandum
concerning language universals. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals
of language (pp. 15–27). MIT Press.
Gross, G. (1996). Les expressions figées en français : noms composés
et autres locutions. Ophrys.
Hamdane, H. (2021). Traduction des parémies marocaines en français :
Équivalences entre les parémies commençant par « lli » en arabe
marocain et par « qui » en fran-çais. Taikomoji kalbotyra, 15, 61–76.
Jespersen, O. (1971 [1924]). La philosophie de la grammaire [M. M.
Léonard, Trad.]. Les Édi-tions de Minuit. [Œuvre originale publiée en
1924].
Kovács, M. (2015). Les aspects de traduction et de transmission de
messages des phrasèmes uni-versels dans le contexte de l’Union
européenne. Thèse de doctorat, Université de Buda-pest.
Martin, R. (2021). Linguistique de l’universel. Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.
Mejri, S. (2008). Figement et traduction : problématique générale.
Meta, 53, 244–252.
Mejri, S. (2010). Les pragmatèmes, des universaux phraséologiques très
idiomatiques : Le cas du « douςa » en arabe. In A. Pamies (Dir.), La
parémiologie contrastive, EURO-PHRAS 2010. Université de Grenade.
Mejri, S. (2023). Prédicats, sens, polylexicalité et figement : un
parcours heuristique. Neo-philologica, 35, 1–40.
Mel’čuk, I. (2010). La phraséologie en langue, en dictionnaire et en
TALN. In Actes de la 17ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique
des Langues Naturelles (TALN), Mon-tréal, Canada.
Mel’čuk, I. (2013). Tout ce que nous voulions savoir sur les
phrasèmes, mais… Cahiers de lexicologie, 102(1), 129–149.
Mel’čuk, I. (2023). General phraseology: Theory and practice. John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Messina Fajardo, L. (2009). Les phraséologiques universels, traduction
et application di-dactique. In M. Quitout & J. Muñoz Sevilla (Eds.),
Traductologie, proverbes et figement (pp. 121–129). L’Harmattan.
Saffi, S. (2005). Les universaux linguistiques. Cahiers d’études
romanes. Revue du CAER, 14, 47–82.
Sułkowska, M. (2013). De la phraséologie à la phraséodidactique :
Études théoriques et pratiques. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.
Sułkowska, M. (2016). Phraséodidactique et phraséotraduction :
Quelques remarques sur les nouvelles disciplines de la phraséologie
appliquée. Yearbook of Phraseology, 7(1), 35–54.
Sułkowska, M. (2025). Le figement langagier. Approche générale,
contrastive et en phraséotra-duction. Défis, problèmes, conceptions.
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.
Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
Lexicography
Semantics
Syntax
Translation
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
French (fra)
Italian (ita)
Portuguese (por)
Spanish (spa)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8
LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:
Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/
De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en
Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com
European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info
John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/
Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org
Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/
MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/
Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/
Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com
SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications
----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1025
----------------------------------------------------------
More information about the LINGUIST
mailing list