“House-High Favourites?” – A Contrastive Analysis of Adjective-Noun Collocations in German and English

Abstract

Everybody is talking about collocational analyses these days… Despite recent advances in the monolingual sector, the bilingual environment has not yet come under close scrutiny. It is especially the adjective-noun combinations that have become the focus of attention when it comes to contrastive phraseological studies. Adjectives in particular are subject to semantic tailoring and it is important to bear in mind that (predictable) interlingual lexical one-to-one occurrence, such as the English starless night and the German sternlose Nacht, is a mere exception rather than the rule in the bilingual adjective-noun state of affairs. Factors that have to be considered are (non-) compositionality in contrastive multiword units, like barefaced lie – faustdicke Luge (‘a lie as thick as a man’s fist’), and metaphorical extensions, like haushoher Favorit – hot favourite (*house-high favourite) as well as structural differences in the two languages in question, like (at) short notice – kurzfristig.