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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).