THE CONCEPTS OF STABILITY AND REPRODUCIBILITY OF GERMAN IDIOMATIC SENTENCES

Abstract

The article highlights the issue of stability and functioning in online texts of a part of German idiomatic sentences – communicative and expressive set phrases such as Da staunt der Laie, und der Fachmann wundert sich! Ach du grüne Neune! Da hört (sich) doch alles auf! Bangemachen (Bange machen) gilt nicht! Ab nach Kassel! Nicht schlecht, Herr Specht! It’s well-known that scientists face certain difficulties when trying to classify these linguistic units – the boundaries between individual categories are defined rather indistinct, there are numerous smooth transitions between groups of set phrases and a difference in terminology. The novelty of the study is their depiction as a functional-semantic field of expressive and communicative formulas. Expressive and communicative formulas are defined as pre-formed (elliptical) sentence-value word combinations, usually fixed in the language community to express the intentions, evaluations and emotions of the speaker, which are characterized by usability, reproducibility, relative stability, complex meaning and perform a communicative and often expressive functions. The conducted analysis of their structural and syntactic variability proved that these units have only relative stability, in connection with which the criterion of functional-pragmatic fixation and usability as well belonging in a conventional form to the mental lexicon of the majority of speakers come to the fore. Lexicographic analysis is complemented by a corpus approach. The potential of corpus linguistics as an empirical method of modern linguistic research is considered, its advantages for phraseology research are highlighted, and the possibilities of using the Internet as a linguistic corpus, in particular, for the verification of lexicographic information are determined.