Non è solo un modo di dire. Locuzioni idiomatiche e variazione linguistica

In a recent small book dedicated to idioms, Lucilla Pizzoli (2020) resumed the investigations conducted by Lurati (2002, pp. 162-164) and Serianni (2010, pp. 84-88) on the contexts of use of some idiomatic phrases, confirming their results: they recur more frequently in the press than in literature and even in everyday dialogues. These results are not taken for granted, especially because idioms have a considerable variety of use, crossing phenomena of variation concerning mainly, but not limited to, diamesic and diaphasic ones. An example of this is the trajectory of the common saying Galeotto fu il libro, which is born from Dante, inspired by the refined French chivalric tales, and converges in the language of use, sometimes enriching in a tasty way the phenomenon known as "Dante pop". Starting from the articles written by the author for the column Per modo di dire. Un anno di frasi fatte, edited for the magazine "Lingua italiana" (Treccani.it) by Alessandro Aresti, Debora de Fazio, Antonio Montinaro, Rocco Luigi Nichil, Rosa Piro and Lucilla Pizzoli, the paper aims to identify and categorize the variety of use of idiomatic phrases, first of all investigated on the diamesic and diaphasic axis.