Phraseology in the columns on language (CSL): thematic object and expression of a linguistic imaginary

Research of the METAPRES group has allowed for analyzing the Columns on Language (CSL) as a specific metalinguistic discourse tradition that has continued since the end of the 19th century. In this context, the role of phraseology is studied in a corpus of CSL published for decades. The principal aim of this paper is to analyze contrastively several authors as a sample of a metalinguistic discourse tradition in which certain compositional and discourse-pragmatic patterns repeatedly occur. Special attention is payed to phraseological units and their communicative function. The article shows the role played by phraseological unites (UFS) as linguistic elements, the extent to which they contribute to the construction of a specific way of presenting language and, consequently, their contribution to the transmission of general conceptions about language.