Phraseologie. global - areal - regional - im Shop von Narr Francke ...

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.