Band 6, Heft 1

Review Editor Andreas Langlotz Université de Lausanne, Switzerland Editorial Board František Čermák Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Prague, Czech Republic Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian

Based on previous research results, the following paper gives an overview of the possibilities of transferring the valence theory to verbal phraseologisms. Verbal phraseologisms display internal and external ‘blank positions’ which can’t be differentiated strictly dichotomically. Moreover, there are certain interferences or transitions between both valence levels. To fulfill a wide phraseology concept, the analysis focuses not only on the verbal idioms, but, furthermore, on the valence of light-verb constructions. Relating to the theoretical status of the valence of these constructions, there exist partially controversial discussions in the latest research which will be illustrated below. Problems of describing these phenomena from a lexicographical perspective will be elaborated in the following. As a last point, a specific phenomenon will be approached that can be classified into the ‘phraseological irregularities’; the so-called ‘valence irregularities’. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that a satisfying description of the valence of phraseologisms can only be accomplished with the help of a corpus-based approach.

Molière’s farce Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) contains a vast selection of formulaic expressions. The play serves as a historical reference for the identification of formulaic language influenced by a period called the préciosité, originating in 17 th -century France. Based upon a survey of French native speakers, this paper will deal with the question of whether these formulaic expressions have left traces upon present day French. Given the empirical evidence, one must conclude that the majority of these expressions are widely known and are in general use today. Furthermore, the hypothesis that such expressions predominate in higher-register French (cf. Klare 2011: 126) is confirmed.

Natural languages have three major families of phrasemes: - Lexical phrasemes (phraseologized phrases): kick the bucket, black box, pay a visit, if you know what I mean. - Morphological phrasemes (phraseologized wordforms, see [Beck & Mel’čuk 2011]): for+get, light+house, in+dispens+able. - Constructional, or syntactic, phrasemes (phraseologized constructions, or phrase schemata): “X (N) V INF ?!?”, as in John be afraid?!? For more details on phrasemes within the Meaning-Text framework, see (Mel’čuk 2015: 336-340). This paper proposes an overview of an important subclass of lexical phrasemes that has not been as yet paid sufficient attention: cliches. First, a typology of lexical phrasemes is presented, with the definitions that underlie the subsequent discussion; this provides a formal framework for the description of cliches (Section 1). Second, the class of cliches is examined and a typology of cliches is proposed, based on the type of the cliche’s referent (Section 2). Third, a dimension for restrictions on the use of lexemic expressions in particular situations of linguistic communication is introduced-namely, a pragmatic constraint. Applied to cliches, it defines a subclass of a subclass of cliches- pragmatemes (Section 3).

Being inspired by the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) and the theory of Symbols in Language and Culture (Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 1996), the current research article aims at analysis of metaphorical image components, symbolic motivational factors and cultural aspects which are associated with the socio-cultural concepts honour and dishonour in Hindi phraseological expressions. By analyzing the conceptualization of these socioculturally prevalent concepts, this research article attempts to explore the potential of marginalized Hindi phraseology for further theoretical contribution to the international phraseology research.

The paper discusses the phenomenon of a culture-related periodic growth of phrasemes, i.e. an intensive increase of their number, occurring within a definite period of time, and caused by some extralinguistic factors. It differs from the absolute growth of the number of phrasemes, connected with the realization of natural nomination needs, constant and not so intensive. A periodic growth is triggered by an important event in the history of a particular culture and it may be assumed that the culture-bound character of the units in question influences their cross-linguistic equivalence. The paper discusses the case of the periodic growth of Polish phrasemes coined after the political transformation of 1989. The periodic increase following this event was chosen for the analysis, since the change of the system influenced greatly all spheres of life in Poland, such as politics, economy, culture. The study aims to present the most important areas of their occurrence, to describe their linguistic properties, to discuss culture-related aspects of their coinage and use as well as to propose the English equivalents of the phrasemes from two fields: politics and economy, which allows for determining the periodic growth influence on cross-linguistic correspondence of this group of units.

This paper shows that Pawley’s conjecture that the frequency of lexical items in text corpora is positively correlated with the number of phrasal lexical items which have those lexical items as heads of phrase is confirmed. Data for testing Pawley’s conjecture are taken from two sources: Kilgarriff’s lemmatized frequency lists from the BNC of the 6,318 words which appear more than 800 times (http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk) and the around 14,000 PLIs in the Syntactically Annotated Idiom Dictionary (Kuiper et al., 2003). Why this statistical fact should be the case is a matter for further research.