A contrastive study of German and Egyptian-Arabic phraseological units with somatic components

Abstract

The aim of this study is to find Egyptian-Arabic phraseologicalunits with somatic components which are equivalent to the German phraseologicalunits. The study also aims at finding the degrees of equivalencebetween the pairs of the phraseological units in this study. Based on analysingthe semantic, syntactical, lexical aspects and also the aspect of imageryof the phraseological units with somatic components as such and intheir relations among each other the phraseological units of the underlyingcorpus are divided according to the following degrees of equivalence,namely full and partial equivalence. On the basis of the findings two typesof equivalence are added namely the phraseological units with asymmetricidiomatic meanings and others considered as “false friends”. The result ofthis study is that only 8,5% of the German phraseological units with somaticcomponents have Egyptian-Arabic phraseological units with somatic componentsas equivalents. Phraseological units with full equivalence appear in32 Egyptian-Arabic phraseological units (nearly 3%), partial equivalence in19 Egyptian-Arabic phraseological units (nearly 1,8%) and phraseologicalunits with asymmetric idiomatic meanings in 38 Egyptian-Arabic phraseologicalunits (nearly 3,6%). The number of the “false friends” among thephraseological units is 10 (nearly 1% of the German corpus).