Editorial

The Yearbook 2019 once again offers a much desired in-depth treatment of historical perspectives.

Comparing linguistic subsystems, lexis is usually held to be the one most exposed to linguistic change, i.e. the subsystem experiencing the most rapid linguistic change. Structured and analogously built corpora covering a certain time period – as the Swiss Text Corpus does for a period of 100 years – can be used to compare the change of words and fixed word compounds. As Andreas Buerki (Cardiff University, Wales) shows in his study, formulaic language changes much more rapidly compared to the “simple” elements of lexis, i.e. the single words.

In contrast, Bettina Bock (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany) and Kristina Manerowa (University of Saint Petersburg, Russia) in their study on fixed word compounds concerning house and home (some of which go back to Old High German) show that even though cultural, social and linguistic change are interconnected, their development is not synchronic, and that phraseological word compounds can remain unchanged even over 1,200 years in the case of an unchanged prototypicality.

The study of Carmen Mellado Blanco (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) demonstrates that in the context of a contrastive orientation, a corpus-based description model leads to a theoretical expansion and an entrenchment not only from a lexico-theoretical perspective but also on the backgrounds of construction grammar. There are convergences as much as divergences – the latter in the filling and in the illocution potential.

With its multilingual orientation and its reference to many scientific, research and linguistic cultures, which are discussed in “big”, traditional languages “accessible” through numerous source languages, the Yearbook also enables an expansion of the general and language-specific theories of fixedness in language generally as well as in specific languages. The analytical bases of contrastive research can be rather traditional and material-oriented, such as the comparison of idioms of drunkenness in Chinese and Spanish. The analysis undertaken by Lei Chunyi (South China Normal University, China) and Antonio Pamies (University of Granada, Spain) shows the comparable and the different aspects of productivity and cultural dependency of idioms of drunkenness in Spanish and Chinese.

The comparison and contrast of Spanish and German is at the center of Juan Pablo Larreta Zulategui’s (University of Sevilla, Spain) study on potential false friends in phraseology. The phraseological word compounds/phraseolexemes are compared structurally from a lexical and semantic perspective and are analyzed along contexts as false friends in the phraseological field.

The comparative and intercultural studies promote the differentiation and expansion of positions regarding the theory of phraseological word compounds on the level of language as such and that of individual languages, not only on a lexical level but also on the level of word syntax. In recent times the concept of patterns, which has received considerable stimulus through construction grammar, has often been used for language comparisons. The comparison of minimal lexical patterns “preposition + noun” in German and Slovakian, undertaken by Peter Ďurčo, Monika Hornáček Banášová, Simona Fraštíková und Jana Tabačeková (University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Slovakia), makes it clear that the German specialty of indefinite preposition–noun word compounds often corresponds to modal words in Slovakian, at least as far as epistemic meaning is concerned. Apart from this, the determining factors and relations are complex. It is rather difficult to define a system of equivalence relations, even if determining factors can be identified – which, as it seems, is also typical for phraseology.

Psycholinguistic and cognitive questions still receive comparatively little attention from the research community. The study of Claudia Lückert (University of Münster, Germany) analyzes word class effects in cognitive processing. It is well-known that in the case of proverbs – and other types of fixed word compounds – the single words are also processed. The finding however that proverbs in American English when containing verbs seem to be processed faster (than nouns), while in the case of single words it is the other way round, is a result which calls for further investigations.

The six reviews at the end of this Yearbook further broaden the spectrum of present phraseological questions and studies beyond the articles and show the variety of findings published in this field of research.

This year, the Europhras community has lost two important founding members: Annette Sabban and Peter Grzybek. We deeply regret their loss – and we miss both of them very much. To honour their memory, we have included extensive obituaries for each.

Zug – July 2019