Kontrastive Phraseologie: zwischen Äquivalenzsystematik und gebrauchsbasierter holistischer Beschreibung

This article first critically examines the concept of equivalence between languages in general, before focusing on contrastive phraseology. This topic is introduced with a brief overview of recent research in this field. The discussion begins by examining two opposing positions: 1) languages are so idiosyncratic at all levels that contrastive phraseology is futile (e.g. Hausmann 1997; Taylor 2012; Schafroth 2020d), and 2) equivalence relations can be postulated a priori, even between phrasemes (cf. bilingual lexicography, including idiomatic dictionaries).

Three phraseme types (formulas, schematic idioms and verbal idioms) will then be subjected to fundamental contrastive analysis (cf. Dobrovol’skij 2022; Mellado Blanco, Mollica and Schafroth 2022). This will result in a plea for an onomasiological perspective in contrastive phraseology (cf. Korhonen 2007; Schafroth 2019) and, on the other hand, a corpus-based (initially monolingual) holistic description with a semantic, pragmatic and culture-sensitive focus (cf. Sabban 2007). The aim is to demonstrate how, based on given categories (e.g. semantic fields/frames, speech acts and restrictions of use) and principles of construction grammar (e.g. Ziem 2018), a lexicographic and digital implementation can be achieved for each phrase pair, as demonstrated in the FRAME and GEPHRI projects (cf. Benigni et al. 2015; Schafroth,2019; Schafroth & Imperiale 2019). Individual linguistic differences between onomasiologically comparable phrasemes (e.g. in syntactic, referential, semantic, pragmatic, or cultural domains) can be summarised in a semasiological annotation apparatus. The article concludes with an outlook on possible future lexicographical representation formats, applications in foreign language teaching and the exemplary and critical integration of ChatGPT as an alternative to corpus research. Examples are given for German, English, French and Italian.