Kontrastive Phraseologie des Fußballs. Ein korpuslinguistischer Zugang

Abstract

Football coverage is considered a rich source for phraseological research. It primarily highlights the functionality of phraseological units within this domain. However, although this research is usually based on corpora, it mostly uses qualitative methods. In contrast, quantifying analyses in the narrow sense based on sufficiently large corpora are hardly available. This article therefore presents a method for the data-driven, i.e. purely quantitative-statistical survey of phrasemes in large corpora of football live text commentaries in six European languages (German, English, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish). With this method, which is based on the determination of recurrent word pairs on the basis of statistical association measures, idiomatic expressions can be accurately identified, which can then be examined from a contrastive perspective. Parallels can be found both in the phraseological designation of typical game situations and in the set of available figurative components. In addition to some culture-specific peculiarities in the football phraseology of the analysed languages, a transculturally shared inventory of both source domains and phraseological units is revealed. However, these form a characteristic phraseological profile of the domain-specific language of football coverage within the respective languages. Thus, the presented method contributes to the contrastive research in the language of football as well as to the phraseologically relevant question of the cognitive and cultural aspects of cross-linguistically widespread idioms.

Keywords

• phraseology
• idiomaticity
• language contrast
• corpus linguistics
• football