The communicative and pragmatic potential of German traditional and modified phraseological units

Abstract

This article examines the traditional form and modifications of the German phraseology «in Saus und Braus leben» in the modern German press on economic topics from 2018 to 2024. The purposes of using phraseological units in the economic media discourse are diverse. Journalists, in an effort to attract the attention of the readers, use vivid and expressive phraseological units often modifying them. The purpose of the article is to determine the communicative and pragmatic potential of the traditional and modified unit, to identify ways of modifying it, and to present a lexical description of the phraseology. The work describes the functioning of this phraseology both in its traditional form and as modified within media discourse. In order to conduct the research, the following methods were used: an analytical and descriptive approach, linguistic stylistic analysis, and systematization of results, continuous sampling, complex linguistic description, statistical processing, and generalization of data. The material for this study consisted of newspaper articles published in German electronic media, such as «Manager magazin», «Die Tageszeitung», «Der Spiegel», «Focus», «Taz», «Berliner Zeitung». During the study, we found that traditional and modified forms prevail in the article body, often realizing the function of attracting attention, expressive and evaluative functions. It was revealed that the frequency of implementation of the modified phraseology is almost 1.5 times higher than its implementation in the traditional form. Both traditional phrases and their modified variants are used in their original meaning without changing the meaning of the sentence. Within the framework of the studied corpus of traditional and modified phraseological units, the following modifications were identified: change of the grammatical form, expansion of phraseology through additional components, replacement of the verb, reduction of the usual form of phraseology. In the course of the study, an expanded model of the dictionary entry was proposed, considering the specifics of the modern functioning of phraseology in the texts of economic discourse. This description will reflect both the traditional form and the structural and semantic modifications of phraseological units in the media discourse on economic topics.