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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).
Page 1 and 2: Jarmo Korhonen/Wolfgang Mieder Elis
Page 3 and 4: Jarmo Korhonen/Wolfgang Mieder Elis
Page 5 and 6: Inhaltsverzeichnis Vorwort ........
Page 7 and 8: Berit Balzer/Rosa Piñel Vorschlag
Page 9 and 10: Vorwort Das Germanistische Institut
Page 11 and 12: Foreword The German Department of t
Page 13 and 14: I. Phraseologie global - areal - re
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