Editorial

A look at this year’s contributions reveals a focus on some key areas of phraseological research. For one, the authors pursue the question of how to advance the phraseological linguistic competence of adults, namely of students who write or translate research articles. It is suggested that teaching students useful word combinations early on helps them in their work and makes them aware of avoidable mistakes. Apart from such “practical” research questions, the present Yearbook contains (still necessary) more general studies, for example on the language-specific use of phraseological units in Spanish in informal and formal situations or on the improved detection of multiword expressions with the help of mechanical tools, with the aim of an improved machine translation. Moreover, conceptual and historical research questions are also given due consideration in this Yearbook.

Attapol Khamkhien (Kasetsart University, Thailand) and Sue Wharton (University of Warwick, UK) deal with multiword combinations from 120 linguistic research articles and analyze a possible connection between frequent multiword combinations and pedagogical usefulness, which they seek to corroborate by including the assessment of qualified professionals. The aim is to equip English teachers with a list of pedagogically helpful patterns of multiword combinations, which they may teach their students who write English as a foreign language, in this case from Thai. Multiword combinations are detected mechanically and therefore often are not phraseological in a narrow sense, especially in specialized contexts (for example multiword combinations such as “Jane Austen’s novels” or “low vocabulary subjects”).

Raluca Nita (University of Poitiers, France) and Ramón Martí Solano (University of Limoges, France) address a particularly difficult aspect in the translation of English from the perspective of French speakers, namely the identification of modified lexical units and their correct translation, which according to the authors is due to the assumed proximity to expressions in their French mother tongue.

Multiword expressions which are discontinuous are more difficult to detect than those which stand in a syntagmatic order. For machine translation, this presents a problem, which Carlos Manuel Hidalgo-Ternero und Gloria Corpas Pastor (University of Malaga, Spain) address in relation to the translation from Spanish to English. The authors present the development of an App which is meant to be able to detect such discontinuous multiword expressions. The way leads via possible discontinuous forms, the detection of relevant results and the identification of irrelevant results (which should not be found). The comparison with Google Translate and DeepL shows the benefits of such an App.

Enrique Gutiérrez Rubio (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic) examines the use of phraseological units in Spanish under formal and informal conditions. His study rests on two oral corpora, his own corpus on the Spanish version of the TV show “Big Brother” (Gran Hermano) and the CREA subcorpus “CREA oral”. His interest also lies in the individual preferences and frequencies of use of the detected phraseological units, which requires the individual contributions to be relatively long. Thus, when talking in their mother-tongue (and not only, as already known, when talking in a foreign language), speakers exhibit different frequencies in their use of phraseological units (especially colloquial ones).

Antonio Pamies-Bertrán and Wang Yuan (University of Granada, Spain) compare the conceptualization of time in spatial categories. This is well-known with regard to European languages, especially English. However, so far we didn’t know whether Chinese as a non-European language resorts to the same verbalizations. The study’s results point to a general use of this type of metaphor.

The fact that idioms, other than lexemes, often allow varied ways of paraphrasing frequently makes them to be understood as “complicated” language units. Thus, Anna Sulikowska (University of Szczecin, Poland) also sees them as motivated, expressive, ambiguous, figurative and related to mental imagery, as well as loaded with additional semantic value. In accordance with a long-standing theoretical tradition, the author views these known effects in connection with the ambiguity and the polylexicality of idioms. With such research questions we keep coming back to the beginnings of phraseology, in this case the publications of Irina Černyševa. The author searches for idioms in the DWDS corpus and submits the evidence to a thorough semantic analysis. She reaches the conclusion that the lexicalized meanings of idioms are hypostasized, or, in other words, that the idiom’s meanings keep changing their form just like amoeba.

M^a Isabel González-Rey (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) equally turns to early beginnings that predate the last third of the 19th century. Thus, the author investigates Hippolyte-Auguste Dupont’s French work Phraséologie française élémentaire first published in 1833, taking interest in the term “phraséologie” as used by Dupont in this work. The study analyzes the work and compares it with Bally’s well-known historical Stylistique (1909). Dupont uses the concept of phraseology for phenomena of syntax, i.e. he does not understand them in today’s sense as lexical phenomena with a transition zone to the syntagmatic level of syntax, which gains in importance especially through the mechanical search of multiword expressions.

Sadly, we again have to mourn a great human and professional loss this year: Gertrud Gréciano is not with us anymore. We thereby have lost a founding member of the European Society of Phraseology. Through her vigorous research activity (at the University of Strasbourg/Saverne) and her untiring commitment, Gertrud Gréciano significantly shaped the teaching and research of phraseology not only in France but also in an international context. She was a friend and motherly advisor to all of us, and especially to junior researchers in phraseology, whom she strongly supported. We are grateful to Laurent Gautier for writing an obituary to honor her memory.

The reviews at the end of this Yearbook deal with four publications covering a broad thematic spectrum: computer phraseology, discursive and text phraseology with regard to Spanish and the relation between Spanish and German, patterns in language and communication, as well as the contact phenomenon of English and Spanish in the USA. Thus, the reviews reveal the variety of present phraseology research.

From 2021, the Yearbook will be directed by two new managing editors, Carmen Mellado Blanco (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and Fabio Mollica (University of Milan, Italy). I wish all the luck and success to both of them and hope that the Yearbook will keep receiving varied and interesting contributions by established as well as younger researchers. May the Yearbook go on to promote the contact and interaction between researchers from all over the world and to develop phraseology in the spirit of the founding members, the former chairmen and chairwomen, the present chairwoman, all the members and all those interested.

At this point, I would like to thank Dr. Janine Wilhelm from Premia Text who managed the past four volumes and was of great help and support to me. She is going to accompany the handover to the new managing editors.

We wish that this Yearbook will be of great interest to our readers and hope that the thoughts and analyses will fall on fertile ground and stimulate further research.

Zug – July 2020