About the Role of the Development of Collocations in the Process of Idiomatization (Based on the German Language)

Abstract

The interpretation of the concept of idiomatization and the related concept of phraseologization was performed by analyzing the process of metaphorical reinterpretation of the collocation (a phraseological unit with partial reinterpretation) resulting in the formation of an idiom (a phraseological unit with a high degree of reinterpretation). In this paper, idiomatization is regarded as the process of reinterpretation of a collocation. The interpretation of the concepts of idiomatization and phraseologization was clarified. The object of research is German idioms, which emerged from collocations that have undergone a semantic shift. Common collocations do not always undergo the reinterpretation process. Therefore, there is no direct dependence between their idiomatization and usage frequency. In addition, language unobservability does not always provide an accurate image of the diachronic changes that a particular collocation is subject to. In this regard, the question was raised about the relationship between the concepts of development and reproducibility (frequency) of a collocation. The high relevance of the research is due to the need to understand idiomatization in the light of both corpus linguistics and language philosophy. The purpose of the study is to define the role played by the development of a collocation in the process of idiomatization. To solve this problem, a diachronistic approach was used during the research. The accumulation of reproducibility changes over the collocation history was interpreted as development. The process of collocation idiomatization was considered as a qualitative-quantitative transition: the degree of development of the collocation (the result of quantitative changes) can become the basis for its transition to an idiom (qualitative change). The paper is intended for specialists in the field of diachronic phraseology of the German language, general linguistics, corpus linguistics, and philosophy of language.