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Jarmo Korhonen/Wolfgang Mieder
Elisabeth Piirainen/Rosa Piñel (Hg.)
Phraseologie
global – areal – regional
Akten der Konferenz EUROPHRAS 2008
vom 13.–16.8.2008 in Helsinki

Phraseologie
global – areal – regional

Jarmo Korhonen/Wolfgang Mieder
Elisabeth Piirainen/Rosa Piñel (Hg.)
Phraseologie
global – areal – regional
Akten der Konferenz EUROPHRAS 2008
vom 13.–16.8.2008 in Helsinki

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Inhaltsverzeichnis
Vorwort ........................................................................................................................................... 9
Foreword ...................................................................................................................................... 11
I. Phraseologie global – areal – regional
Elisabeth Piirainen
Common features in the phraseology of European languages:
Cultural and areal perspectives ..................................................................................................... 15
Antonio Pamies-Bertrán
National linguo-cultural specificity vs. Linguistic globalization:
The case of figurative meaning ..................................................................................................... 29
Wolfgang Mieder
“Many roads lead to globalization”. The translation and distribution of
Anglo-American proverbs in Europe ............................................................................................ 43
Wolfgang Eismann
Remarks on Russian phrasemes in European languages ............................................................... 61
Harald Burger/Peter Zürrer
Französische und italienische Einflüsse auf die deutsche Phraseologie –
Wann es sie gab und ob es sie heute noch gibt ............................................................................. 73
Csaba Földes
Auswirkungen des Deutschen auf die Phraseologie seiner östlichen Nachbarsprachen ............... 91
Kari Keinästö
Arme Ritter zwischen Baum und Borke? Phraseologismen deutscher Herkunft
im hohen Norden ........................................................................................................................ 109
Gyula Paczolay
Some examples of global, regional and local proverbs in Europe and in the Far East ............... 121
Bettina Bock
Kann man indogermanische Phraseologismen systematisch rekonstruieren? ............................ 129
Liudmila Diadechko
Winged words as a nation consolidating factor .......................................................................... 137
Natalia Filatkina
Historical phraseology of German: Regional and global ............................................................ 143

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Inhaltsverzeichnis
Željka Matulina/Zrinka orali
Das Fremde im Eigenen. Integrierung von Topoi fremder Herkunft
in eigensprachige Kontexte ......................................................................................................... 153
Sabine Fiedler
„Am Ende des Tages zählt die Performance.“ – Der Einfluss des Englischen
auf die Phraseologie der deutschen Gegenwartssprache ............................................................. 163
Anita Pavi Pintari
Das deutsche Element in der kroatischen Phraseologie .............................................................. 173
Mudite Smiltena
Lettische Idiome im Rahmen des Projekts „Weit verbreitete Idiome
in Europa und darüber hinaus“ ................................................................................................... 179
Günter Schmale
nun di Die isch han de Flämm – Französische Einflüsse auf phraseologische
Ausdrücke des Rheinfränkischen ................................................................................................ 185
Bernhard Brehmer
Komparative Phraseologismen in den slavischen Sprachen: Vorüberlegungen
zu einer areallinguistischen Betrachtung .................................................................................... 195
Ane Kleine
Jiddische Phraseologie – Phraseologie einer Fusionssprache ..................................................... 205
Matthias Funk
Kurz- und langfristige Tendenzen in der Sprichwortentwicklung .............................................. 213
Anna Idström
Challenges of documenting the idioms of an endangered language:
The case of Inari Saami .............................................................................................................. 221
Annette Sabban
Für ’n Appel und ’n Ei: Phraseme mit sprechsprachlichen und dialektalen
Komponenten und ihre Verwendung im Text ............................................................................. 229
II. Phraseologie kontrastiv bzw. vergleichend
Viktoria Umborg
Deutsche feste Wortverbindungen in Fachtexten im Vergleich mit ihren
estnischen und russischen Entsprechungen ................................................................................ 239
Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij/Tatjana V. Filipenko/Artëm V. Šarandin
Phraseologie im „Neuen Deutsch-Russischen Großwörterbuch“ ............................................... 247
Peter uro
WICOL – Deutsch-Slowakisches Kollokationswörterbuch ........................................................ 255
Iva Fidancheva
Malediktische Euphemismen – Die verletzende Macht der Höflichkeit ..................................... 261

Berit Balzer/Rosa Piñel
Vorschlag eines klassifikatorischen Modells für Routineformeln
psycho-sozialer Art ..................................................................................................................... 269
Carmen Mellado Blanco
Die phraseologische Äquivalenz auf der System- und Textebene
(am Beispiel des Sprachenpaares Deutsch-Spanisch) ................................................................. 277
Encarnación Tabares Plasencia
Ausgewählte Übersetzungsprobleme der juristischen Fachphraseologie.
Vergleich Deutsch-Spanisch ....................................................................................................... 285
Heike van Lawick
Phraseologismen in der Minderheitensprache Katalanisch: Global, areal oder dialektal?
Eine korpuslinguistisch gestützte Untersuchung von Übersetzungen ........................................ 293
Ayfer Akta
Eine kontrastive Darstellung der deutschen und türkischen Geld-Phraseologismen .................. 301
František ermák
Binomials: Their nature in Czech and in general ........................................................................ 309
Joanna Szerszunowicz
On cultural connotations of idioms expressing language users’ collective memory
in a comparative perspective. A case study: gest Kozakiewicza ................................................. 317
Maria Celeste Augusto
Phraséologies de l’œil en portugais et en néerlandais dans un cadre
lexico-sémantique – une approche contrastive ........................................................................... 325
Maria Husarciuc/Anca-Diana Bibiri
Phraseological units between national specificity and universality. Contrastive
approach applied to French and Romanian languages ................................................................ 333
Antonio Pamies-Bertrán et al.
Implementación lexicográfica de los símbolos desde un enfoque
multilingüe trans-cultural ............................................................................................................ 339
Elena Berthemet
“Phraseological Equivalence” in digital multilingual dictionaries ............................................. 351
Juan de Dios Luque Durán/Lucía Luque Nadal
Cómo las metáforas recurren a conocimientos ontológicos y culturales.
Fundamentos teóricos del Diccionario Intercultural e Interlingüístico ....................................... 359
Stefan Hauser
Von Sündern, Sümpfen und Seuchen – Reflexionen zum Konzept „Sprache als
kulturelles Gedächtnis“ am Beispiel des Dopingdiskurses ......................................................... 367
7

8
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Melanija Larisa Fab
Pop-kulturelle Aspekte der phraseologischen Kompetenz: Die text- und
(denk)stilbildenden Potenzen phraseologischer Einheiten in deutschen
und slowenischen Hiphop-Texten ............................................................................................... 375
Sabine Mohr-Elfadl
Zum phraseologischen Ausdruck von Temporalität im deutsch-
französischen Vergleich .............................................................................................................. 381
Tamás Forgács
Phraseologische Einheiten im Spiegel der lexikalischen Bedeutung .......................................... 389
Nihada Delibegovi Džani/Sanja Berberovi
Conceptual integration theory and metonymy in idiom modifications ....................................... 397
Stephan Stein
Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, phraseologisch gesehen ........................................................ 409

Vorwort
Das Germanistische Institut der Universität Helsinki und die Europäische Gesellschaft für Phraseologie
veranstalteten mit Unterstützung des Finnischen DAAD-Vereins vom 13. bis 16. August
2008 in Helsinki eine internationale Konferenz mit dem Rahmenthema „Phraseologie global –
areal – regional“ (= EUROPHRAS 2008). Die Konferenz, an der über 200 Personen aus 34 Ländern
teilnahmen, setzte sich aus zwei Teilen zusammen: 1. aus einem Symposium zum Thema
„Languages and Cultures under the Pressure of Globalization: Phraseology – a Burden or a
Benefit?“ und 2. aus EUROPHRAS-Sektionen und dem Workshop „Collocations in Specialized
Discourses“. Das Programm des Symposiums, das einen Teil der Feierlichkeiten zum 100-jährigen
Bestehen der Finnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften bildete, bestand aus sieben Vorträgen,
in denen die Beeinflussung der Phraseologie bestimmter Sprachen durch andere Sprachen thematisiert
wurde. Neben Referaten zum Rahmenthema der Konferenz wurden anschließend in sieben
parallelen Sektionen solche zu Ursprung, Entwicklung, Struktur und Gebrauch von Phraseologismen
sowohl in einzelnen Sprachen als auch kontrastiv bzw. vergleichend zwischen mehreren
Sprachen gehalten. Die Zahl der Referate in den Sektionen und im Workshop belief sich insgesamt
auf 162 (zum Verlauf der Konferenz vgl. auch die beiden Berichte von Annikki Liimatainen/Ulrike
Richter-Vapaatalo in: http://www.europhras.org/bulletin/Europhras_Bulletin_Gesamt_2009.pdf,
S. 7-11 bzw. von Antje Heine u. a. in: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 110, S.
255-263).
Da die Veröffentlichung aller bei EUROPHRAS 2008 gehaltenen Vorträge schon aus finanziellen
Gründen nicht in Frage kommt, haben die Organisatoren folgende Entscheidung getroffen:
Eine Auswahl der Vorträge, die sich direkt auf das Rahmenthema beziehen oder kontrastiv bzw.
vergleichend zwischen verschiedenen Sprachen oder Sprachvarietäten angelegt sind, wird in einen
Sammelband aufgenommen, für weitere Vorträge ist die Veröffentlichung im Internet vorgesehen.
Darüber hinaus haben sich nach der Konferenz einige Kollegen bereit erklärt, jeweils eigene
Sammelbände herauszugeben, und zwar neben dem Workshop zu folgenden Teilbereichen: Routineformeln,
Phraseologie in literarischen Texten und computergestützte Phraseologie. Insgesamt
wurden den Organisatoren 98 Beiträge für die Veröffentlichung angeboten.
Auf der Basis einer Begutachtung und gemeinsamen Beratung durch die Herausgeber wurden
in den vorliegenden Sammelband 43 Beiträge aufgenommen. Die Auswahl der Beiträge gründet
sich auf inhaltliche und qualitative Kriterien, wobei zusätzlich darauf geachtet wurde, dass möglichst
viele Sprachfamilien (germanisch, slawisch, romanisch usw.) vertreten sind. Der Band besteht
aus zwei Blöcken: I. Phraseologie global – areal – regional und II. Phraseologie kontrastiv
bzw. vergleichend. An den Anfang des ersten Blocks wurden die sieben Symposiumsvorträge
gestellt. Ihnen folgen zunächst Beiträge, in denen die Phraseologie unter globalem Gesichtspunkt
betrachtet wird; dabei kann der globale Aspekt durch areale und/oder regionale Aspekte ergänzt
sein. Danach kommen Beiträge, in denen die Globalisierung als Entlehnung von Phraseologismen
aus einer Sprache in eine andere verstanden wird. Am Ende von Block I. stehen Beiträge, in denen
areale oder regionale Aspekte der Phraseologie im Vordergrund stehen. Der zweite Block
wiederum wird durch kontrastive Beiträge eingeleitet. Als erster erscheint ein Beitrag mit drei
Sprachen, in den folgenden Beiträgen werden jeweils zwei Sprachen einander gegenübergestellt.
Maßgeblich für die Anordnung der Beiträge mit zwei Sprachen war die Zugehörigkeit der unter-

10
Vorwort
suchten Sprachen zu bestimmten Sprachfamilien. In den meisten Beiträgen wird eine germanische
Sprache (vor allem das Deutsche) mit einer slawischen oder romanischen Sprache kontrastiv beschrieben,
weshalb ihnen der Vorrang gegeben wurde. Der Aufbau des zweiten Teils von Block
II., d. h. der Komplex der vergleichenden Beiträge, ist dem des ersten Teils ähnlich. Am Anfang
stehen Beiträge mit mehreren Sprachen, gefolgt von Beiträgen mit zwei Sprachen. Auch in den
letztgenannten Beiträgen steht die deutsche Sprache an zentraler Stelle.
Die Durchführung der Konferenz EUROPHRAS 2008 wurde durch finanzielle Unterstützung
von acht Institutionen und eine großzügige Spende von Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Mieder ermöglicht.
Die Institutionen waren: Finnische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Verband der wissenschaftlichen
Gesellschaften Finnlands, Emil Öhmann-Stiftung, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst,
Europäische Gesellschaft für Phraseologie, Universität Helsinki, Germanistisches Institut
der Universität Helsinki und Neuphilologischer Verein in Helsinki. Allen Sponsoren möchte ich
auch an dieser Stelle einen herzlichen Dank aussprechen, ebenso danke ich der Europäischen
Gesellschaft für Phraseologie und dem Germanistischen Institut der Universität Helsinki für die
Bewilligung der Zuschüsse, die für die Drucklegung des Bandes erforderlich waren. Den übrigen
Mitgliedern des Organisationsausschusses (Prof. Dr. Irma Hyvärinen, Dr. Antje Heine, Dr. Ulrike
Richter-Vapaatalo, Petra Schirrmann-Krapinoja, Nadia Gondolph und Jouni Heikkinen) sowie
allen Mitarbeitern und Studierenden, die bei der Vorbereitung und Organisierung der Konferenz
geholfen haben, bin ich sehr dankbar. Petra Schirrmann-Krapinoja und Nadia Gondolph schulde
ich außerdem großen Dank für die Hilfe, die ich von ihnen für die Bearbeitung und äußere Vereinheitlichung
der Beiträge sowie für die Erstellung der Druckvorlage erhalten habe. Desgleichen
gebührt Kai Kuosmanen ein Dankeschön für die Lösung mancher EDV-Probleme. Schließlich
danke ich dem Gunter Narr Verlag für die gute Zusammenarbeit und meinen Mitherausgebern
Wolfgang Mieder, Elisabeth Piirainen und Rosa Piñel für ihren engagierten Einsatz bei der inhaltlichen
und sprachlichen Bearbeitung der Beiträge.
Helsinki, im Oktober 2009 Jarmo Korhonen

Foreword
The German Department of the University of Helsinki and the European Society of Phraseology,
supported by the Finnish DAAD Alumni Club, hosted an international conference in Helsinki on
August 13-16, 2008. The topic was “Phraseology global – areal – regional” (= EUROPHRAS
2008). Over 200 people from 34 countries participated in the two-part conference. Part 1 was a
symposium on the topic “Languages and Cultures under the Pressure of Globalization: Phraseology
– a Burden or a Benefit?” Part 2 consisted of EUROPHRAS sections and a workshop entitled
“Collocations in Specialized Discourses”. The symposium program, part of the festivities celebrating
the 100 th anniversary of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, consisted of seven
lectures on the central theme of how the phraseology of certain languages influences others. Following
these lectures there were seven simultaneous sections about the origin, development,
structure and use of phraseologisms within individual languages as well as comparisons and contrasts
of multiple languages. In total there were 162 presentations in the sections and workshop
(for further information about the conference as such please see the two reports by Annikki Liimatainen/Ulrike
Richter-Vapaatalo at: http://www.europhras.org/bulletin/Europhras_Bulletin_Gesamt_2009.pdf,
pp. 7-11 and by Antje Heine et al. in: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 110, pp.
255-263).
As the publication of all presentations from the EUROPHRAS 2008 is not possible primarily
due to financial reasons, the organizers came to the following decision: A selection of presentations
which are directly related to the central theme or show a contrast or comparison between
various languages or language varieties will be included in an essay volume. Additional presentations
will be published on the internet. Furthermore, after the conference several colleagues
agreed to edit their own essay volumes in addition to the workshop in the following areas: routine
formulas, phraseology in literary texts and computer-supported phraseology. A total of 98 contributions
were submitted to the organizers for publication.
After an appraisal and consultation among the editors, 43 articles were accepted for this essay
volume. The selection of articles was based on contextual and qualitative criteria as well as the
inclusion of as many language families as possible (Germanic, Slavic, Romance, etc.). The essay
volume consists of two parts: I. Phraseology global – areal – regional and II. Contrastive and
comparative phraseology. At the beginning of the first part are the seven symposium lectures.
Following these are articles in which phraseology is examined from a global viewpoint, with the
global aspect at times being supplemented by areal and/or regional aspects. Next are articles in
which globalization is understood as one language borrowing phraseologisms from another. At
the end of part I are articles focusing on areal or regional aspects of phraseology. Part II opens
with contrastive articles. First is an article contrasting three languages, the following articles all
contrast two languages. The order of articles dealing with two languages was based on membership
of the examined languages to specific language families. In most articles a Germanic language
(primarily German) is contrasted with a Slavic or Romance language, which is the reason
they were given precedence. The arrangement of the second section of part II, i. e. the group of
comparative articles, is similar to the first section. At the beginning there are articles dealing with
multiple languages, followed by articles about two languages. Again the German language has a
central role in these articles.

12
Foreword
The EUROPHRAS 2008 conference was made possible through financial support from eight
institutions and a generous donation from Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Mieder. The institutions are: Finnish
Academy of Science and Letters, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, Emil Öhmann
Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service, European Society of Phraseology, University
of Helsinki, German Department of the University of Helsinki and Modern Language Society in
Helsinki. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks again to all sponsors as well as special
thanks to the European Society of Phraseology and the German Department of the University of
Helsinki for approving the grant for the printing of the essay volume. I am also very grateful to
the other members of the organization committee (Prof. Dr. Irma Hyvärinen, Dr. Antje Heine, Dr.
Ulrike Richter-Vapaatalo, Petra Schirrmann-Krapinoja, Nadia Gondolph and Jouni Heikkinen)
and to all employees and students who helped in the preparation and organization of the conference.
I would like to express a special thank you to Petra Schirrmann-Krapinoja and Nadia Gondolph
for their help with the editing and standardization of the articles as well as with the preparation
of the printer’s copy. Thank you also to Kai Kuosmanen for solving computer problems. And
finally I would like to thank the Gunter Narr Publishing House for the good collaboration and my
co-editors Wolfgang Mieder, Elisabeth Piirainen and Rosa Piñel for their dedicated work with the
content and language of the articles.
Helsinki, October 2009 Jarmo Korhonen

I. Phraseologie global – areal – regional

Elisabeth Piirainen (Steinfurt)
Common features in the phraseology of European
languages: Cultural and areal perspectives
1 Introduction to the problems
The linguistic discipline of phraseological research looks back at a more than one hundred year
old tradition. The studies on phraseology carried out by Charles Bally (1905; 1909), especially his
influential classification of fixed expressions in the context of his “stylistique”, are usually regarded
as the beginning of modern linguistic research into phraseology. Indeed it was Charles
Bally who pointed out extensive cross-linguistic similarities between the languages of Europe that
were even more striking than their differences – a fact he tried to link to a “European mentality”:
Même pour un observateur superficiel, les langues modernes des pays dits « civilisés » offrent des ressemblances
en nombre incalculable, et dans leur incessante évolution, ces langues, loin de se différencier,
tendent à se rapprocher toujours davantage. La cause de ces rapprochements n’est pas difficile à
trouver; elle réside dans les échanges multiples qui se produisent de peuple à peuple, dans le monde matériel
et dans le domaine de la pensée. […] Appelons ce fonds commun, faute de mieux, la mentalité européenne.
(Bally 1909, 22f.)
Whether Bally also had phraseology in mind here, and which modern languages exactly he was
referring to, is not explicitly clear from his remarks. It should be noted, however, how even more
than one hundred years ago there was an awareness of the far-reaching similarities between the
languages of Europe. Still to this day, and despite the vast amount of work on idioms, almost
nothing is known about the actual similarities that exist between idioms in the European languages.
1 Neither the numerous studies on idioms of various individual languages nor the equally
comprehensive work on contrastive comparisons of the idioms of two or more languages have so
far been able to change this. They have not been able to name the actual idioms that have equivalents
in many European languages and thus describe what idioms can be counted among the “core
inventory” of a common European phraseology.
Further questions that remain unanswered until today include: Which languages take part in
the phraseological correspondences? Are there areal centers within Europe? Can differences be
detected between the literary languages und the less established minor languages of Europe? Of
particular interest would be, ultimately, the causes of those similarities, i. e. the historical, geographical,
social and cultural factors that are responsible for the dissemination of certain idioms in
many languages inside and outside of Europe.
Solutions to this type of problems cannot be hoped to be tackled by individual people, but only
through collaboration of a large group of researchers and by bundling research initiatives within a
long-term perspective. The fact is, however, that phraseological research even today is more likely
to be undertaken by individuals than in larger teams. At the same time, researchers often work
on the same problems, even on almost identical phraseological material, without mutual awareness
of their colleagues’ work. Furthermore, researchers tend to group Europe into small units of
1 Unlike idiom research, proverb studies were practised on a multilanguage scale from the beginning, cf. Paczolay’s
(1997) studies on the European proverbs. There is no tradition of Europe-wide idiom studies that would be comparable
to the prosperous international cooperation in the field of proverb research, a gap that was not even recognised until
recently.

16
Elisabeth Piirainen
two or three languages per unit that are separated from other languages by clear boundaries, without
regard to the whole. This can be illustrated with a very recent example, cited here only as one
example of many similar studies.
In a conference volume that was recently published (Álvarez de la Granja 2008), there are 19
contributions from the field of cross-linguistic, mainly bilingual, phraseology. There are several
cases where one and the same idiom is discussed in different articles of the book, without reference
to one another. For example, an article on Latvian and French proverbs (Billere 2008, 256)
finds that both languages reveal the same attitude towards a man’s work: “Quand il s’agit de
l’attitude des gens envers le travail, les français aussi bien que les lettons associent le travail au
pain”, citing the French idiom manger son pain à la sueur de son front “to eat one’s bread by the
sweat of one’s forehead”. The biblical origin of the idiom (Genesis 3:19) or the linguistic situation
in languages other than Latvian and French, however, play no role.
The same idiom is the topic of a trilingual study in the above-mentioned volume (Ayupova
2008, 51), which observes that “[w]hen a Russian works very hard his face sweats ( –
with sweat in one’s face), whereas sweat will on the Englishman’s brow (the sweat of one’s brow)
and the Tatar’s forehead ( – with sweat on the forehead).” The author comes
to the conclusion that “[s]uch differences in the componential structure of interlingual phraseological
equivalents cannot be due to any other factor than people’s differing mentalities, linguistic
images of the world, or the associations speakers of these languages make.” (ibid.) Again,
instead of a consideration of the cultural and historical background – the fact that the lexical differences
between face, brow and forehead are due to different biblical traditions, i. e. to different
translations of one and the same verse from the Bible – unsound explanations are made based on
“people’s differing mentalities”.
Such examples show that phraseological research has to get away from accidental observations
on “similarities” or “differences” of idioms in a few languages and instead study the phenomena
across as many languages as possible. Above all, phraseology is a linguistic level that – due to its
interrelation with culture – can be better explored and understood in a pan-European context. An
inventory of idioms that shows equivalents across many languages, be it in the form of a reference
book or otherwise, is a matter of urgent necessity in order to provide researchers with information
that goes beyond only a few languages.
As only a large-scale investigation can reveal, more than 52 European languages have adopted
equivalents of the idiom by the sweat of one’s brow (or German im Schweiße seines Angesichts
“by the sweat of one’s face”, Spanish con el sudor de su frente “with the sweat of his forehead”,
etc.). Map 1 illustrates the diffusion of the idiom: Languages marked on gray rectangles possess
equivalents. Certain regularities can be discovered with respect to the different constituents: All
Romance languages, as well as Albanian, Greek and North Finnic languages have the variant with
forehead, all Germanic languages (except for English), the Baltic languages, Hungarian and Maltese
have the variant face, while the Slavonic languages vary between the two or use them side by
side (e. g. Macedonian vo potta na svoeto lice/elo “in the sweat of his face/forehead”). The
variant brow is restricted to English, Irish (as allas a mhalai/le hallas a mhalaí “by the sweat of
his brow”) and West Karaim, a very small declining Turkic language (manlajynyn terinia kadar
(išliamia) “(to work) till the sweat on one’s brow”). Other Turkic languages (Turkish, Tatar and
Azerbaijani) follow the pattern forehead. A variant “with sweat on one’s cheek” is known in Latvian
(ar sviedriem vaig). Map 1 is among the early results that emerged in the context of the
project “Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond”, which will be briefly outlined below.

Common features in the phraseology of European languages: Cultural and areal perspectives 17
Map 1: Equivalents of the idiom by the sweat of one’s brow/face/forehead in European languages 2
2 Widespread idiom research: theoretical framework
In the age of information, a comprehensive database that could include the totality of idioms of
dozens of languages is no longer a utopia. Today’s technological possibilities allow the storage of
enormous amounts of linguistic data, as well as easy retrieval for specific, precisely formulated
questions. However, intensive groundwork, undertaken by a large group of linguists, would be required
in order to encode the phraseological data accordingly and make them comparable to each
other. If the most common idioms (those that are present in the speaker’s mental lexicon) of various
European standard languages were registered in a database and made compatible with each
other, it would be considerably easier to answer the questions regarding presumable common
features of idioms of the European languages that were raised above. The project “Widespread
Idioms in Europe and Beyond” should be regarded as one small step into this direction. 3
One of the main goals of the project is to identify the core inventory of idioms that exist in
many languages (Europe-wide and beyond), based on a systematic analysis of this phenomenon
across all European languages accessible to idiom research. As the project to be introduced here
breaks new ground in linguistics, we must first develop its theoretical foundation and a suitable
2 The occurrence of the Yiddish idiom arbetn mitn shveys fun dem ponim cannot be depicted on the map.
3 The project has been supported by the European Society of Phraseology from its beginning in 2004 and is now actively
supported by the team of the Cultural Historical Research Centre established at the University of Trier (Dr. Natalia
Filatkina and Dr. Ane Kleine; www.hkfz.uni-trier.de). However, all work on the widespread idiom project has
been carried out based on the voluntary collaboration of more than 200 individuals.

18
Elisabeth Piirainen
metalanguage. As a working term, Widespread idiom (or WI for short), has been suggested. 4 Because
this term is newly introduced to linguistics, we need to create a working definition. This
definition must be based on criteria by which actual WIs in Europe and beyond can be singled out
from other idioms that exist in some five, six or more languages. Therefore, the definition is initially
based on heuristics, starting exclusively from the linguistic situation of Europe and the empirical
multilingual phraseological data.
As far as the linguistic situation of Europe is concerned, with its many genetically diverse languages
between the Atlantic and the Ural mountain range, extra-linguistic factors are taken into
account. In order to be considered “widespread”, idioms must occur in languages of the main
geographic regions of Europe; this means that they are not only genetically distant but are also not
neighboring geographically. By this criterion, idioms are excluded which may exist in several
languages but whose circulation is restricted to only a small area (comparable to a “Sprachbund”
where languages are in narrow contact with each other, be it through a diglossic situation, roofing
languages or cross-border contacts). The definition will not require any particular minimum number
of languages involved.
Furthermore, the specific characteristics of the semantics of (prototypical) idioms are included
in the definition. This refers to the interaction of the two semantic levels of an idiom: its inner
form (the literal meaning) and its figurative or actual meaning. Firstly, idioms to be designated as
WIs must have the same or a similar lexical structure in various languages. Secondly, these idioms
must have a similar figurative meaning, 5 to be precise: they must share the same figurative
core meaning.
Such wide concepts of similarity both at the level of literal readings and at the level of actual
meanings leave room for an interpretation of each individual case within its historic-cultural development:
We must take into account the characteristic feature of idioms as linguistic signs that
are handed down historically and coined culturally. In the course of history, both the literal and
the figurative meaning of an idiom of an individual language can be affected by individual developments
that are unique to one language. If, therefore, lexical-semantic divergence is observed
from a synchronic perspective, cultural foundations must be taken into account to clarify the question
whether we are dealing with a WI or not. 6
The definition is thus: Widespread idioms (WIs) are idioms that – when their particular cultural
and historical development is taken into account – have the same or a similar lexical structure
and the same figurative core meaning in various different languages, including geographically
and genetically distant languages.
3 Ascertaining widespread idioms: methodological approach
It is completely unpredictable which idioms are actually affected by a wide dissemination and
which ones are not. There are some vague ideas that idioms originating in works of world literature,
in the Bible or Greco-Roman classics, tend to exist in many languages, but nothing definite
can be said which these idioms are in reality. The German phraseological lexicon, for example,
has about 150 idioms of biblical origin (cf. Parad 2003), most of them being more or less wellknown
and actively used by the speakers. However, no explication has been found, why “only” 43
biblical idioms and further 12 idioms known both from the Bible and other texts are really spread
4 Terms like Europeanism or internationalism are not appropriate for our objectives (cf. Piirainen 2008a, 244f.).
5 By this criterion, cases are excluded where lexical structures that are identical simply by chance lead to diverging
semantic results (so-called false friends).
6 Therefore, the proper place of this research project is not in contrastive linguistics in the traditional sense. It cannot
primarily be concerned with relationships of equivalence between idioms of different languages (e. g. with respect to
all their diasystematic features or their syntactic, pragmatic, and/or textual behaviour).

Common features in the phraseology of European languages: Cultural and areal perspectives 19
across many languages (see section 4 below). The same holds for modern source domains of idioms
such as sports (e. g. racing, boxing, and athletics). It remains unclear why there are equivalents
of the idioms a race against time, to be on the finishing straight or to hit below the belt in 40
or more languages, while idioms such as to be off the starting blocks or to clear a hurdle can be
found at best in a dozen of languages.
In order to ascertain widespread idioms, extensive groundwork has been done, relying on the
assistance of experts of many languages. The WI data have been collected as follows: First, a list
of about 1.000 potential WIs was compiled based on some preliminary knowledge and later completed
by systematic and large-scale studies, checking many publications on phraseology and
idiom dictionaries. The starting point was not only some major “school languages” of Central
Europe, but also included Finnish, Greek and Russian. The idioms then have been pre-tested by
experts of further geographically and genetically diverse languages (Hungarian, Estonian, Latvian,
Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian, Spanish and Romanian). The result was a remaining core set of
about 400 actual “widespread idiom candidates” which then had to be reviewed for as many languages
as possible.
For this purpose a network of competent collaborators has been built up and questionnaires
with the “WI candidates” were sent via e-mail to many native speakers and linguists, covering
more than 80 languages and asking addressees to answer the questions based on both their own
competence and discussions within their circle of colleagues. The questionnaires were filled in
carefully for the most part. Several participants have verified their information via text corpus
analyses or investigations on the Internet. For several minor and minority languages, these resources
did not exist, neither was it possible to refer to idiom dictionaries. In these cases the informants’
answers were a particularly valuable and a unique source.
4 Cultural foundations of widespread idioms
At the time of this writing, the surveys have produced a total of 330 items that fulfill the criteria
of widespread idioms. The main question of the cultural domains that the WIs belong to can now
be answered more precisely. Idioms that are really widespread across the languages of Europe and
beyond can be categorized according to their cultural foundations. For this purpose, the distinction
between a synchronic and a diachronic (etymological) level of analysis can be left aside. This
means that the set of widespread idioms can be structured, for the most part, according to the
underlying etymological and cultural features. Quantitative aspects of the cultural foundations
have also emerged. Five main parts can be distinguished and divided into 19 smaller groups, even
though they tend to overlap and interrelate. We will give a short overview.
Part I: Intertextuality
The greatest part, with 173 items almost half of the entire inventory of WIs, is made up of idioms
that belong to the cultural domain of intertextuality. Idioms of this kind have an already existing
(mostly identifiable) text as their sources. 7 The inventory clearly shows which works of literature
and which details of passages in a text have led to widespread idioms and which ones have not.
The WIs discovered so far are distributed, in varying numbers, over seven groups of sources of
text passages:
7 It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the term intertextuality in detail. Phraseology researchers use it with
different meanings. Burger (1991) applies it to the availability of pre-fabricated text fragments (aphorisms, slogans,
book titles etc.) and their interweaving in a text, while paremiologists understand it in the sense of the interrelation between
proverbs and narrative texts (cf. Carnes 1994). Intertextuality is even seen as a constituent element or definition
criterion of the proverb (Bauman/Briggs 1990; Winick 2003, 589).