Volume 9, Issue 1

The central point of discussion is how idiom motivation is reflected in the Conventional Figurative Language Theory. Most lexical units are motivated to a certain extent, i.e. they point to their actual meaning via the meanings of their parts, either parts of their structure or of their conceptual basis. Several types of motivation can be distinguished in the field of phraseology. Apart from the quite small number of idioms where no comprehensible link can be found between the literal reading and the figurative meaning that would allow for a meaningful interpretation of a given expression, all other idioms have to be considered transparent or motivated. Idioms form a very heterogeneous domain in terms of motivation. There are levels of motivation and semantic predictability both from the perspective of a speaker and from the perspective of the semantic structure of a given unit. In this paper, we present a typology of motivation that captures all types of transparent idioms. The typology of idiom motivation connects our theory to the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and to the Construction Grammar approaches.

Proverbs (as Time is money) are conventionalized expressions that are “equivalent to a sentence” and “express generalized experiences or value judgements” (Steyer 2015: 209-210). This study aims at describing the lexical structure of the proverb inventory and at identifying ‘proverbial keywords’ which may be assumed to play an important role in storing proverbs in the mind (Luckert 2018). A database of American English proverbs was compiled and content words were tested for their contextual predictability (with COCA as ‘normative corpus’ using a ‘goodness-of-fit’ test). The results suggest that 59.4 % of the word lemmas are significantly over-represented in the proverb corpus (i.e. ‘keywords’). This finding underpins the assumption that a considerable number of words are strongly associated with the proverb as a category. In the experimental part of the project it was tested whether the ‘keywords’ differ in how well they contribute to a strengthened memory representation of proverbs.

Building upon recent phraseological studies of Old High and Middle High German texts, the alliterating word pairs in the later works of Hartmann von Aue are catalogued and analyzed philologically, thus contributing to an emerging complete listing of the paired rhetorical expressions through the Early Middle High German period, here Hartmann’s major courtly Arthurian romance, Iwein, his religious tale Gregorius, and Der arme Heinrich. Each pair is listed, described in the context in which it appears, and compared with any extant pairs from earlier German works. Previous research on the pair is reviewed. Hence, we trace the evolution of these expressions, in some cases through centuries. On the one hand, Hartmann employs alliterating expressions that date to the Old High German period, while on the other hand apparently creates new, or at least not previously documented ones. As in findings in earlier texts, pairs recorded on multiple occasions are likely to have been used by other authors. Typical for medieval German texts - when compared to similar modern expressions - is the insight that there is a fair amount of variation concerning the sequence of the alliterating elements and/or the inclusion of morpho-syntactic modifiers such as pronouns, possessives, adjectives, or adverbs. When known, later examples of the alliterating word-pairs are cited, albeit for obvious reasons only in an incomplete fashion. Two updates on the emerging Old High and Early Middle High German word-pair catalogue are included. Finally, a complete listing of the alliterating word-pairs in Hartmann’s works is provided. The long-term project continues to chart the emergence of German alliterating word-pairs chronologically, here within the first decade of the thirteenth century.

The paper aims to explore how the process of phraseologism-formation is linked with the process of perception as part and parcel of human cognitive activity. Specifically, the research focuses on the role synesthesia plays in the construction of phraseological meaning. We proceed from the claim that the perceptual experience a human gains through multiple sensory channels while cognizing the world is preserved in the language semantics. Therefore, one of the main assumptions of the research is that synesthesia as a result of crossintegration of various perceptual sensations and their (sub)modalities influences the formation of phraseologisms and can be traced in their semantics. To test this assumption, a representative corpus of English and Russian phraseological units (more than 3,000) is analyzed. In the course of the analysis different types of synesthetic transfers that underlie the phraseological meanings in question are established. Special attention is paid to the way in which synesthesia is involved in the construction of the deep stratum of phraseological semantics that consists of the conceptual foundation (i.e., macro-metaphorical conceptual model) and phraseological image. Overall, the study offers further evidence that phraseological meaning is derived from the perceptual experience and from various synesthetic transfers in particular.

Ιn phraseodidactic research there is a broad agreement upon the fact that collocational fluency is a significant factor of language fluency. For this reason high frequency and common set phrases with a high relevance in written and oral communication should be subject to systematic teaching. However, we still have insufficient knowledge about the proper learning progression that accounts for an adequate sequence of introducing set phrases according to the degree of difficulty in the lesson of German as a foreign language. Progression is not to be organized in purely formal terms, but rather in terms that involve factors such as the age, the genre, the association with speech acts and the L1-knowledge. Especially the formal, semantic and pragmatic congruency of L1 and L2 is an essential factor that affects the degree of difficulty and subsequently the burden of learning associated with set phrases. The present study focuses on a subset of the phraseological core vocabulary (“Optimum”) by Hallsteinsdottir et al. (2006) which consists of the 142 representative, i.e. frequent and common, set phrases in German. It aims to determine their difficulty degree for learners with Greek as L1 by highlighting the interlingual equivalence relations by means of methods of contrastive linguistics: L1-L2 proximity is assumed to have a positive impact on learning reducing the learning burden, whereas lack of proximity is assumed to increase the difficulty degree. In line with the results of the interlingual contrastive survey, proposals are formulated for a comprehensible learning progression that provides continuity in the development of phraseological competence based on the common reference levels of language proficiency.