Phraseological constructions preposition + noun in German and Slovak

Abstract

On the example of lexico-syntagmatic combinatorics of minimal phrases of the preposition + noun type, a new approach to the study of equivalence from the point of view regarding their collocability, aspects of use, and recurrent lexical expansion models based on large corpora in German in compariosn to Slovak is presented. A special type of German prepositional phrase (PP) with a zero or fossilized article is examined. The zero article or the fossilized article before the noun indicates a higher degree of lexicalization and is therefore of particular interest from the point of view of phraseology. Analysis of PP is primarily carried out in their usual language environment in authentic corpus data. The corpus data in the form of cooccurrence-profiles and recurrent lexical extensions are processed qualitatively from the point of typical reproducible lexical-semantic fields, for which a special lexpan program is used. This approach is used in parallel to find equivalence in the German-Slovak language pair. The article shows the reasons for the polyequivalence of this type of minimal phrases. Convergences and discrepancies between PP and their equivalents do not form clear disjunctive relationships. Factors affecting the equivalence of PP include the divergences of extensional or intensional semantics and the scattered inclusion of aspects of use, typical collocation profiles of the compared PP, and their recurrent extension models. In the German-Slovak comparison, the heterogeneous character of compatible verbs with special features in aspect and type of action also plays an important role. These analyses are evidence for our previous observations, which showed that the equivalent depends on the typical fixed, usual environment and the hypothesis of a prototypical equivalent in the case of PP raises serious doubts.