Volume 10, Issue 1

Addressing a topic that has been marginal to discussions within historical linguistics, this study looks at how extent and speed of language change can be quantified meaningfully using corpus data. Looking specifically at formulaic language (understood here as word sequences that instantiate typical phrasings), a solidly data-based assessment of the speed of change within a 100-year time window is offered. This includes both a relative determination of speed (against the speed of change in lexis which is generally thought to be the fastest type of linguistic change, cf. Algeo 1980: 264; Trask and Millar 2010: 7) as well as a new independent measure of speed which is easy to interpret and therefore of high validity, while also robust and potentially applicable to any linguistic feature that can be counted in corpus data. Using data from a diachronic reference corpus of 20th century German, it is shown that change in formulaic language is very notably faster than lexical change, that the extent of change over a century is comparable in extent to contemporary inter-genre variation and that overall, the rate of change does fluctuate somewhat at the level of temporal granularity employed in this study. It is also argued that quantifying the speed of linguistic change can play an important role in building a deeper understanding of language change in general.

Cultural and social change goes hand in hand with linguistic change, especially in the form of semantic change, but also as phraseological change. The following questions are addressed in this article: What happens to phrasemes when a fixed component of them is undergoing semantic change? And what happens when the meaning of a phraseme as a whole changes? Which connections between cultural-social and phraseological change become visible? Using German phrasemes from the semantic field “home” as an example, seven possible cases of the connection between semantic and phraseological change are examined: The components of a phraseme and the phraseme as a whole do not change in essential areas of their semantics and prototypicality A component of a phraseme changes its meaning regarding one or more prototypical features, but the phraseme as a whole retains its meaning A component of a phraseme changes its meaning prototypically and the phraseme gains a new overall meaning The components of a phraseme do not change with respect to their prototypicality, but the phraseme as a whole does A phraseme dies out, although the components survive A component dies out, but the phraseme itself lives on One component changes and the phraseme dies out. Methodologically, the etymology of semantic fields and linguoculturology also play a role in the examination. The semantic field “home” offers itself for the analysis in a special way, as the home has been a central element of human life through the ages, which on the one hand shows a great stability as a concept, but on the other hand is exposed to innovations again and again. Accordingly, the examples cover the entire period of German language history from Old High German to evidences from the 21st century.

In the persistently sparse interlingual studies in the field of Construction Grammar, grammatical constructions are the main concern of research (Koch 2016; Boas and Ziem 2018), while constructional idioms, defined as form–meaning pairings with lexically fixed constituents and free lexical slots, have been analyzed mainly monolingually, with very few exceptions. See, amongst others, Dobrovol’skij and Pöppel (2017), Mollica and Schafroth (2018) and Mellado Blanco et al. (forthcoming). This lack of studies from a contrastive point of view may be related to the lexical underspecification of constructional idioms and to the difficulties in assessing their often high pragmatic potential. Against this background, the present paper aims to give impetus to the contrastive studies in the field of constructional idioms and Construction Grammar by means of the language pair German–Spanish. In order to achieve this goal, a multi-level corpus-based description method for the determination and analysis of interlingual equivalent constructional idioms at the lexicographical level was developed using five comparison parameters. The contrastive description model was successfully implemented on the comparative constructional idiom [ von A so viel verstehen/Ahnung haben/sich auskennen wie X von/vom Y] (‘von A absolut nichts verstehen’) ([ from A V to have as much understanding / knowledge as X from Y] (‘to understand absolutely nothing from A’)) and on its functionally equivalent construction in Spanish [ Ventender/saber de A lo (mismo) que/como yo de X]. Both comparative constructions are characterized by their negation value and a pronounced ironic meaning, respectively. Their intralingual description from a constructional grammatical point of view represents a further goal of this paper.

This study, based on the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Conventional Figurative Language Theory, presents a cross-linguistic comparison of the idioms on drunkenness in Chinese and Spanish, applying the analytical method with three hierarchical levels (iconic models > archi-metaphors > particular metaphors). The findings show that, on the one hand, though linguistically and culturally very distant, these two languages share some iconic models (i.e. animal, movement, body part, plant and aggression ) in their idioms on inebriation; on the other hand, they also have their own ways in expressing drunkenness, due to their particular cultural backgrounds, i.e. religions, superstitions, history, ethnic prejudices, legends, etc. The present investigation also proves the universality of the cognitive thinking model of human beings as well as the cognitive specialization in different cultures, giving an insight into idiom comprehension and intercultural communication.

In comparison to the contributions that address interlingual phraseological equivalence, the number of papers about the topic of phraseological false friends is relatively low. This is probably explained by the fact that this is a marginal phenomenon from a quantitative point of view. Nonetheless, there are relevant contributions in the field of foreign German Studies. The aim of this article is, on the one hand, to discuss theoretical questions about tertium comparationis and terminology and, on the other hand, to develop a classification of the types of potential phraseological false friends. This paper must therefore be understood as a preliminary stage for applied work in the areas of foreign language teaching, (not only) bilingual lexicography and translation theory and practice. Based on a comprehensive empirical basis, the present article studies nominal, adjectival and especially verbal idioms. For the collection of both corpora and the codification of the lemmas various methods were used: the consultation of specialized dictionaries, the use of the author’s own foreign and native language competence, the search of context examples from the databases Corpus de referencia del español actual (CREA) and Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo), and the consultation of informants. Through this methodological approach, the article tackles the levels of the language system and also of the language usage. In this respect, and due to the problem of the so-called broad or complex meaning of idioms, difficulties associated with the analysis of lexicographic definitions are of particular relevance. Depending on the lexicographic sources, differences in questions such as the complexity of the definitions or the number of sememes are noticeable. On the level of meaning, componential analysis represents the theoretical framework. Thus, the semantic structures of the idioms to be compared are analyzed in order to discover to what extent the whole meaning (sememe) or some of the minimal semantic features (semes) of the units are qualitatively different or in unequal numbers. Differences can be found both at the level of monosemic units – where either (i.1) the sememes of the units to be compared is basically different, or (i.2) one or several semes of the units to be compared differ – and also at the level of polysemic units, if the form of the idiom of one language with several sememes finds an identical or similar form in the other language but the latter does not have the same sememes. The semantic analysis performed is thus the basis for the determination of the different types of semantic interferences, which can lead to communicative misinterpretations to various degrees. On the level of expression, the analysis is based on a structural-cognitive hypothesis that postulates both a figurative and a logical-abstract formal identity. The formal similarity between idioms (and other types of phraseologisms) in different languages is not rooted in the phonetic and graphical (quasi-)identity of the units to be compared, but in the identity or in the somewhat similar height of the phrase image. Beyond such a concept of lexical-figurative identity, we find a broader conception of formal equality, which is understood not only as a structural lexical-figurative identity, but also as a likeness or identity of the logical-hidden scheme beyond the image; this scheme can initiate the same idiomatic inference procedures, even if the idioms diverge figurative-lexically. A meticulous interlinguistic analysis of the phraseological false friends is only possible by means of a clear distinction between both levels of meaning and expression, which must be reflected terminologically. In this sense, we refer to the proposal of B. Wotjak, which uses the term Kongruenz to denote cases of equality of linguistic forms, as a counterpart to the term Äquivalenz on the content level, i.e. the equality on the level of meaning. The term interlingual homonymy , on the other hand, is avoided because of the special nature of formal equality between idioms.

The paper focuses on the problems of the lexicon-grammar continuum using the example of the lexical-syntagmatic combinatorics of minimal phrases. The focus is on binary preposition + noun phrases with their recurrent collocation partners and syntagmatic context patterns. Together with other (con)textual elements, they form conventionalized and lexically stabilized patterns that have flowed together through recurrent use and repeated occurrence of related linguistic structures in various contexts. The phenomenon requires an inductive bottom-up analysis process. Statistically calculated syntagmatic profiles of selected German prepositions based on linguistic corpora serve as our analytic starting point. The German preposition–noun constructions are then subjected to a corpus-based examination in the contrast language Slovak with respect to their equivalence from the following aspects: – individual language specifics and cross-language regularities of the lexical stabilization of individual phrases – nature of lexical fillers in comparable patterns – equivalence of meanings and/or functions by different contextual factors.

Proverbs (as Easy come, easy go ) are a type of conventionalized multiword unit that can be used as separate, complete statements in speech or writing (Mieder 2007; Steyer 2015). The rationale of this study is to examine word class effects in online processing of proverbs. In Lückert and Boland (submitted), we reported facilitative effects associated with proverb keywords which suggests that word-level properties are active alongside properties of the level of the multiword unit. Previous research has shown that individual word classes have different effects in online language processing. Numerous studies revealed that verbs are processed more slowly (Cordier et al. 2013) and involve greater processing demands compared to nouns (Macoir et al. 2019). The results of the present study suggest that verbs rather than nouns facilitate proverb processing. A distributional analysis of word classes in proverb corpora implies a trend to prefer verbs over nouns in American English proverbs.