Volume 8, Issue 1

From a theoretical point of view, most researchers agree that phraseological modifications are characterized by three key features: 1. occasionality, 2. intentional deviance from conventional use, and 3. context-boundedness. The present paper deals with the feature of occasionality and its operationalization in the context of text-based phraseological research. In text-based studies to date, occasionality has been identified with an absence of lexicographic codification. Phraseological structures and meanings registered in dictionaries have been regarded as conventional, uncodified structures and meanings, as occasional and, eventually, as modifications unless there is clear evidence of an unacceptable and incorrect use of the phraseme. In this paper, however, it is argued that a simple identification of lexicographic codification and conventionality on the one hand and non-codification and occasionality on the other does not permit an adequate distinction between conventional and occasional uses of phraseological units. Instead, in the approach proposed here, it is the relative frequency of the particular phraseological form in the DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) that is used as the distinctive criterion to decide upon its status as conventional or occasional.

The starting point of this paper is a particular idiom category. It deals with idioms that contain determinative compounds of a special kind. The first element of the compound points to the figurative meaning of the idiom, while the second element is a part of the source concept of the metaphor and thus interacts with the literal meaning. An appropriate apparatus for describing idioms of this category is provided by the Conceptual Blending Theory. It is shown that, apart from metaphorization processes, the blending of mental spaces plays a significant part in bringing about the figurative meaning of the idioms. At the same time, the paper supports the recently discussed hypothesis that phrasemes can be constructed according to certain patterns as recurrent form-meaning pairs. Therefore, the paper contributes to Construction Grammar as well as to Blending Theory and clarifies some aspects of idiom semantics and motivation.

One of the main challenges for research in the field of Phraseology is to discover how phraseological combinations can be integrated into the grammatical rules they seem to contradict. This paper explains some theoretical concepts which may shed some light on the relation between regular syntax and phraseological fixedness. Firstly, we explain how the concept of grammatical metaphor, applied to phraseology, allows to distinguish phrasemes from free combinations, and also to separate the phrasemic subclasses from one another. Secondly, we analyze the different degrees of fixedness of phrasemes in terms of functional idiomaticity, as a consequence of grammatical metaphor, resulting from the relation between the inner and outer syntax of the phrasemes, which is parallel to their semantic idiomaticity. Thirdly, we focus on some particular cases of this mechanism, such as discontinuous, interlocking and overlapping phrasemes, as well as the so-called open-slot idioms. We conclude that the application of grammatical metaphor to phraseology brings up to surface a parallelism between idiomatic meanings and idiomatic structures, which is an essential property of phrasemes.

Variant forms of idioms have been retrieved from an American English corpus of 450 million words to test the idiom decomposition hypothesis. The central claim of the hypothesis concerns the relationship between the degree of decomposability and the flexibility of idiomatic expressions: the more decomposable the idiom is, the more variable it is assumed to be. While Part I of the study is concerned with variation in the verb, Part II focuses on operations in the noun phrase constituent of the idiom. Part I compares flexibility data based on syntactic alternations pertaining to the expression as a whole and morphological variations of the verb (number, person, tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation) with one categorical and two scalar decomposability rankings. For the vast majority of verb-related variations, flexibility is not correlated with decomposability. The morphological category of voice has been found dependent on categorical decomposability, but it is not the highest decomposability class that exhibits the highest degree of variability.

Variant forms of idioms have been extracted from an American English corpus of 450 million words to test the idiom decomposition hypothesis, which proposes a dependence relation between the degree of idiom decomposability and the extent to which expressions are variable. The more decomposable the idiom is, the more flexibility it is expected to exhibit. In this second part of the study, morphological flexibility (number and determiner) as well as lexico- syntactic flexibility (the addition of various pre- and postmodifiers) of the noun have been assessed and related to three decomposability rankings. The results provide some support for the hypothesis. Of the individual flexibility dimensions, only number variation has been found to be significantly dependent on scalar decomposability. Of the overall measures, noun morphology and overall noun variation are significantly correlated. The relation between overall modifier variation and scalar decomposability is close to statistical significance, although premodifier and postmodifier variations taken separately do not show any dependence. None of the variation measures appear to be related to categorical decomposability.

This paper presents a group of phraseological units which are similar to compounds in respect to structure, semantics and cognitive aspects. Terms such as Kap der guten Hoffnung (‘Cape of Good Hope’), Dreißigjähriger Krieg (‘Thirty Years’ War’), rechter Winkel (‘right angle’) and erste Hilfe (‘first aid’) are often considered to be problematic. These so-called Wortgruppenlexeme (WGL, multiword lexemes, phrasal lexical units) can be seen as lexemes consisting of two or more orthographically separate words. They form a syntactic and semantic unit, are motivated, and more or less free of connotations. They are relatively fixed, except for inflection. Many of them are phrasal names or clearly defined terms. Like compounds they are bases of shortening. In some variants of German they are extremely frequent and productive. Analyses of data collections show a relatively high percentage of WGL in languages for special purposes. They constitute 20% or even more than a third of the lexicon, considering repertory as well as neologisms. Thus, WGL are a systematic and productive way to coin new words analogously to compounds, but in contrast to all other types of phraseological units. To summarize, there are several reasons to posit WGL next to compounding and to see them as lexemes. Accordingly, they should be considered as analytical word formations. In this article we plead for the treatment of WGL in German word formation.

Following the tradition of embodiment hypothesis suggested by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the current research article aims to explore metaphorical concepts of happiness in Hindi phraseological expressions. The embodiment hypothesis postulates that phraseological expressions, especially idioms, are not the frozen building blocks of a language, but motivated linguistic bundles, which encode and reflect the physical and socio-cultural experience of a given linguistic community (see Gibbs 1993). In this regard, this article not only proposes the metaphorical instances of motivated Hindi phraseological expressions but also highlights the underlying socio-cultural particularities. This article is expected to contribute to international phraseological research given that Hindi language, particularly Hindi phraseology, has hardly been taken into consideration to validate or refute the postulates of embodiment hypothesis in connection with the conceptualization of emotional concepts.

The aim of this study is to make a detailed description of the polysemic structure of the phraseme a conciencia. The methodology is based on an understanding of lexical semantics including the parameter of frequency of use in corpora (see Sinclair 1991), with data drawn from Corpus del Espanol del Siglo XXI (CORPES XXI). I will first discuss briefly certain issues relating to polysemy that will arise in the analysis; second, I will make an initial approach to the meaning of a conciencia based on lexicographic information, to be followed by a presentation of the corpus analysis itself. Finally, I will consider the semantic study of this particular phraseme by considering its combinability as seen in the contexts studied. In the conclusions I will try to show the internal structure of the form.