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International Journal of Lexicography Advance Access originally published online on November 7, 2006
International Journal of Lexicography 2006 19(4):397-418; doi:10.1093/ijl/ecl025
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© 2006 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Many Faces of Negation – German VP Idioms with a Negative Component

Diana Stantcheva

Department of Arts, Languages, and Literature, American University in Bulgaria

(dstantcheva{at}aubg.bg)

The present paper investigates the behaviour of the negative component of German VP idioms in the process of their text embedding. The data excerpted from the corpus of the ‘Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts’ (‘Digital Dictionary of the German Language of the 20th century’) demonstrates a high degree of lexical variability and mobility of the negative component very similar to the negation in freely composed expressions, and the complete loss of the negation (affirmation) with maintenance of the idiom-specific idiomatic meaning.

1 By VP idioms we mean fixed combinations of words containing at least one verb and one noun.

2 "Blatt && Mund": Find all sentences with all morphological variants of the words Blatt (leaf) and Mund (mouth). "[NEG] #3 Pferd": Find all sentences with all morphological variants of the word Pferd (horse) together with some expression of negation. For details of formulating search queries, refer to Herold in this volume.

3 Due to limited space I cannot discuss here in detail all idioms with a negative component investigated within the framework of the project.

4 Similarly, Fix (1976: 69) points out in relation to the idiom jmd. ist kein großes Licht (s.b. has a limited intellect): ‘’Kein’ setzt die . Wendung in Opposition, ohne den Inhalt der Aussage zu ändern’. (‘’Kein’ [no] places the . phrase in opposition without changing the content of the statement’.)

5 Concerning the lexicographical description of idioms with an ‘obligatory negative constituent’ Sternkopf (1990: 294f.) requires the inclusion of a negative element in the meaning explanation. He considers such a meaning explanation to be very important from the point of view of the teaching and learning of German as a foreign language.

6 In German the word Blatt means both leaf and sheet of paper.

7 See also Fleischer (1997: 92). In connection with this type of change Fleischer (ibid.) had to admit that the claim concerning the ‘obligatory [fixed] character’ of the negative component is valid ‘with certain constraints’ for a large part of phraseological units with a negative component.


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