In bocca al lupo! / Hals und Beinbruch! A contrastive analysis of wish formulae in German and Italian

ABSTRACT Routine formulae are significant linguistic phenomena in the areas of foreign language teaching and bilingual lexicography. Nevertheless, few contrastive analysis of these units exist for the German-Italian language pair. The aim of this paper is a pragmalinguistic contrastive analysis of ‘wishing formulas’. The main criterion of contrasting is the pragmatic value of the units, i.e. the speech acts that can be performed through them, as well as the situational and sociolinguistic features of the formulae and the productivity of certain syntactic-lexical patterns in German and Italian. Equivalences and differences between groups of formulae as well as between the individual units of both languages are identified.