Towards a Description of Urdu Multiword Items for English Learners: A Lexicological Perspective

Abstract

There is a considerable shift in foreign language learning from single word lexical items to multiword items, also known as phraseology. As meaning is present in larger stretch of language, the significance of these multi-word items of language has increased many times. To comprehend a phraseological unit is attached with the probability of our better understanding about the world diachronically. Multiword items include idioms, collocations, set phrases, proverbs, etc.  Anyhow, handling of collocations and idioms for the learners of a foreign language is very challenging. The undertaken study is a systematic attempt in this regard to describe Urdu language on the level of lexical collocations and idioms. The corpus of Urdu language “urTenTen: Corpus of Urdu Web” has been used for the description of Urdu lexical collocation. To process the corpus data, “Sketch Engine” has been used. The retrieval of Urdu lexical collocations and idioms are supposed to be a rich resource for Urdu lexicologists, lexicographers, grammarians, language learners and teachers, etc.