A Feeling, a Desire, or Something Else? A Case Study of Idioms with Voglia and How Learners of Italian as FL and SL Acquire Them

In foreign and second language teaching, helping learners to become socio-pragmatically competent means supporting them in developing awareness of sociocultural variables (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and knowledge about taboos, mutual rights, obligations, and conventional courses of action that apply in the community of the target language (Roever, 2006). Idioms, from this perspective, are useful communication tools that reflect the interaction of language systems with the emotion system, which deals with the assignment of values and opinions to specific entities, events, or situations (Foolen, 1997). However, coping with formulaic constructions, which interpretations are unpredictable from individual lexical meanings under the effects of regular compositional rules, is not always an easy task, especially when it comes to consistently distant cultural and linguistic references (Kecskés, 2014). In this presentation, Italian formulaic constructions with voglia will be analyzed in terms of cultural significance to facilitate learners in developing socio-pragmatic awareness. As a matter of fact, this noun can be considered conceptually transparent, if the meaning “desiring something or someone” is maintained in the in-context. On the other hand, as grammaticalization stages of the expression hai voglia di might lead to morphosemantic opaqueness, learners could find it harder to decode (Brinton & Traugott, 2005). For this reason, in order to facilitate FL/SL Italian learners in developing such socio-pragmatic awareness, the study aims to design an effective and ad-hoc teaching intervention. Before implementing the pedagogical treatment, a data-driven investigation will be conducted with both native and non-native speakers: the purpose is to observe their degree of awareness in encoding expressions derived from the target construction avere voglia di, such as avoglia and hai voglia. Data analysis will provide evidence in terms of natives' perceptions and most common contexts of usage, as well as learners' difficulties in understanding/producing the formulaic expression. Within this framework, the teaching intervention will be structured.