Corpus-based approach to phraseology research: New evidence from parallel corpora

Abstract

The present paper discusses the possibility of using parallel corpora in the study of phraseology. The results of the analysis support the assumption that the use of corpus data not only significantly improves cross-linguistic descriptions, but also changes the very idea of the specifics of phraseology as a subsystem of the lexicon. Parallel corpus data make it possible to identify the language-specific features of idioms that were traditionally considered completely equivalent. As the empirical bases, parallel subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) are used: Russian-German and primarily German-Russian. In some cases, the material of the main corpus of the RNC is involved. In addition to the task of identifying similarities and differences between semantically similar idioms of German and Russian, the paper also addresses general issues, in particular the question of the boundaries of the concept of crosslinguistic equivalence and ways to operationalize it. At least two different types of equivalence have to be distinguished: equivalence at the level of the language system and equivalence at the text level. The proposed method includes a subsequent comparison of individual pairs of correlating idioms of different languages based on corpus data. It aims at identifying differences between them, including semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and combinatorial ones. The results of the performed analysis may find application in bilingual lexicography.