CORPORA ANALYSIS IN RESEARCH OF “FALSE FRIENDS” PHRASEMES

Corpora analysis tends to be one of the most popular methods in
linguistic research. It has become recently one of the active
research methods for studying phraseology and describing
phraseological units, their actual meanings, usage, stylistics and
connotations. Corpora analysis provides a lot of help in
investigation of phraseological “false friends”: dealing with texts
collections one can get an idea of modern phraseological means,
dynamics of their development, appearing of new actual
meanings and obsolescence of the old ones being the questions
that play a significant role in identifying phraseological “false
friends”. The paper presents tentative results of the research into
translator’s (interpreter’s) phraseological “false friends” in
German and Russian and aims to establish the role of corpora
analysis as the main investigation tool.
Phraseological units have always been in the focus of linguistic
interest. As almost every scientist tried and named these units in
their own way, nowadays we have to deal with a great variety of
coinages: phrasemes, praseological units, idioms, set phrases etc.
Following the German phraseological studies tradition, we accept
“phraseme” and “phraseological unit” as generic terms to refer to
all types of set phrases. We take phraseological units to mean set
phrases that differ from free word combinations in
reinterpretation of lexical and grammatical components,
fixedness, component separability. They are reproduced as a
whole and usually reveal no fixed model in their composition.
The phenomenon of the so called translator’s (interpreter’s)
phraseological “false friends” deserves special consideration.
This type of phrasemes may hinder adequate comprehension of
foreign speech and provoke mistakes in translation.
Phraseological “false friends” differ in nature from lexical “false
friends”. Lexical “false friends” share sound or graphic form,
which may cause misunderstanding, whereas “false friends”
phrasemes may not sound alike but evoke identical images and
differ in actual meaning. Phraseological “false friends” may also
differ in meaning scopes or connotations in two languages.
The following corporus analysis is based on the German language
corpus DeReKo created by the German Language Institute in
Mannheim. The corpus appeared in the mid-1950s and has
become the largest German corpus supplied with all necessary
lemmata (corpus annotations). The corpus is provided with a
special tool “COSMAS” (Corpus Search, Management and
Analysis System) which enables the researcher to choose one of
15 libraries, set restrictions and get background information like
source, author, publisher etc. The present research deals only with
the latest data in German and leaves out other variants of the
German language (Austrian and Swiss). Only 30 first contexts
(hits) containing a target phraseme are taken into consideration.
This number seems to be enough because new meanings that are
not usually fixed in the dictionaries appear not later than in the
15-th hit. For another thing the contexts tend to repeat after the
30-th hit in the corpus.
The corpus research of 30 German phraseological “false friends”
has produced the following results:
– some phrasemes or their certain meanings have become
obsolete because they are not to be found in DeReKo anymore.
Modern dictionaries have to be improved as they provide no
information about these changes;
– some phrasemes are often used in their literal meaning which
indicates a certain connection between components of a set
phrase an its meaning and argues that components may influence
the usage of a set phrase as a whole;
– set phrases marked as “colloquial” in dictionaries are rare in
the corpus, because they are unusual for the written language;
– certain phrasemes are used in meanings other than those
recorded in modern dictionaries. Such instances need special
consideration because they do not definitely point out the
development of some new phraseological meanings but can be a
result of a false usage.
The method of corpora analyses proved out to be of great
assistance in phraseological research and in research of “false
friends” phrasems in particular. It is used not only to establish
and characterize such units but also to get a lot of help in
answering theoretical questions, e.g. classification of
phraseological “false friends”.
Keywords: phraseology, corpora analysis, “false friend”
phrasemes