Idiome unter dem diskursiven Aspekt am Beispiel des Corona-Diskurses. Ein onomasiologischer Zugang

Abstract

Abstract One of the most important issues in interpreting the role of phrasemes in discourse concerns identifying phrasemes that are typical of discourse and those that indicate discourse. This paper attempts to identify discourse-relevant idiomatic phrasemes (idioms) based on a large corpus of press texts from Süddeutsche Zeitung on the Covid-19-discourse. For this purpose, a deductive method is applied. The corpus is analysed for the keywords, -terms, and Ngrams to identify the main discourse strands. The thematic domains were determined according to the discourse strands, based on which, idioms that could potentially occur in the analysed discourse were defined onomasiologically and extracted from the phraseological dictionary. Subsequently, the extracted units were searched for in the corpus. In the final step, the relative frequency of the idioms in the studied discourse was compared with their relative frequency in reference corpora. The chapters on the methodology and results of the study are preceded by theoretical reflections on discourse, phraseology, and attempts to combine the assumptions of these two disciplines. The study reveals that the methodology used allows for the identification of phrases that are typical of a particular discourse. First, some of the phraseological units studied actually occurred in the discourse. Second, most of the idioms with the highest frequency in the studied discourse occurred more frequently in the Covid-19-corpus than in the reference corpora. However, the method has some limitations in terms of the time required and the number of results obtained. The qualitative analysis of the idiom with the highest increase in frequency shows that it is indeed used because of the main topic of the discourse, and thus can be considered both typical and as an indicator of this discourse.