Resumen del proyecto

Gramática de Construcciones y Fraseología: construcciones fraseológicas del alemán y español en contraste a través de los corpus. Construction Grammar and Phraseology: German and Spanish Constructional Idioms in contrast through Corpora (FFI2019-108783RB-100)

ENTIDAD FINANCIADORA: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. Proyectos de I+D+i – RTI (Retos Investigación).

DURACIÓN: 2020-2024.

INVESTIGADORA PRINCIPAL: Carmen Mellado Blanco

En colaboración con investigadores de la Academia Rusa de las Ciencias, la Universidad de Tübingen y el Leibnitz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache de Mannheim.

The principal aim of the project is to create an online platform with (1) phraseological combinations of [Prep. + Noun] structures in German and Spanish, and with (2) syntagmatic patterns (constructional idioms) of these structures in both languages.

The phraseological binomial [Prep. + Noun] will be extracted from the German macrocorpus ReDeKo (6.100 million words) and will be analyzed using COSMAS II (“Corpus Search, Management and Analysis System”), both belonging to the Leibnitz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim, Germany). Frequency data from the [Prep. + Noun] co-occurrences will be linguistically described to determine whether the extracted binomials are “usuelle Wortverbindungen” / “phraseological combinations” or not. In this regard a high degree of co-occurrence or combinatorial restriction between preposition and noun is not enough, but a non-summative meaning is also needed. “Non summativity” does not refer to the idiomatic nature in the traditional sense of “non compositionality” of phraseological meaning, but to its character of communicative units with an additional pragmatic meaning that does not derive from the mathematical sum of the individual meanings of the constituent units. This additional meaning often comes from the lexical and syntagmatic interaction between the phraseological combination and its co-text. For this reason, and to formulate a definition of the selected units according to their use, we analyze the phraseological combinations through the “Collocations” tool of Sketch Engine (deTenTen18), so that we can identity possible syntagmatic patterns abstracted from the phraseological binomials (the project’s second aim).

Those structures that have been considered “syntagmatic patterns” (constructional idioms) will be linguistically analyzed to identify their meaning, paying special attention to the implicatures and the illocutive value they reveal in context. The modular analysis is developed within the general assumptions of Construction Grammar approaches: (1) type and token frequency, (2) construction’s productivity, (3) construction’s entrenchment, (4) horizontal and vertical links among different idiomatic constructions, (5) paradigmatic analysis of the slots in order to abstract potential semantic fields or pragmatic values (e.g. semantic prosody).

The third aim of the project is to offer the Spanish correspondences not only of the phraseological binomials but also of their syntagmatic patterns. Searching for co-occurrences and Spanish equivalents in esTenTens18 (Sketch Engine) and PaGeS (Parallel Corpus German-Spanish) will allow us to linguistically describe the potential equivalent patterns of the German constructional idioms.