International Journal of Lexicography Advance Access originally published online on November 2, 2006
International Journal of Lexicography 2006 19(4):419-438; doi:10.1093/ijl/ecl026
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Going to the Dogs? A Contrastive Analysis of S.th. is Going to the Dogs and jmd./etw. geht vor die Hunde1
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
(elkegehw{at}zedat.fu-berlin.de)
The paper discusses the origins of equivalent idioms across languages, and specifically the emergence of English s.th. is going to the dogs and German jmd./etw. geht vor die Hunde. Then a contrastive analysis of the two idioms is presented, departing from the assumption that superficially equivalent idioms must exhibit semantic and pragmatic differences. It will be shown that the two idioms differ not only with respect to frequency and register but prefer different external arguments, have different variants, and stand in different relations to other forms in the lexicon.
1 Thanks to all of my colleagues who have read and commented on earlier versions of this paper, especially to Christiane Fellbaum, Patrick Hanks, and Undine Kramer. I also want to thank Paul Bogaards who has made valuable comments.
I have used the following corpora: the extended DWDS Corpus (around 980 million words), the British National Corpus (around 100 million words) and the Associated Press Corpus (around 150 million words; courtesy of Patrick Hanks) as well as data from the Google Groups. Example sentences from the Google Groups were used because both BNC and Associated Press Corpus did not contain a sufficient number of occurrences of the idiom to allow general statements. Possible differences between BrE and AmE had to be ignored.
2 In the Project Collocations in the German Language the citation form reflects the normal and typical, that is the most frequent, use of the idiom. In English, the idiom exhibits a distinct preference for the progressive tenses and the present perfect. In German there is a preference for the present tense. Note that there is no overt progressive aspect in German and also no real equivalent of the English present perfect tense; both tenses are best expressed by the simple present form. The same is the case with the future tense, which in German is also often expressed by using the simple present. As the English translations of the German example sentences show, many of the German examples actually express a progressive aspect or are best translated using the present perfect or a future tense.
3 Jmd. wirft Perlen vor die Säue, meaning ‘s.o. gives s.th. worthy to s.o. who does not appreciate it’ is also well-known idiom in German (cf. also note 6).
4 Dogs, for example, seem(ed) to be often associated with negative characteristics. Many of the English and German collocations and idioms containing dog, refer to something negative, for example to be sick as a dog, give a dog a bad name, dog-in-the-manger, dog days (cf. ODGD, s.v. dog), or das ist zum Junge-Hunde-Kriegen, ein dicker Hund, schmecken wie Hund (cf. Duden 11, s.v. Hund, s.v. schmecken), to name just a few.
5 Many thanks to H. Petermann of the DWB, who kindly helped me finding the relevant dates.
6 It seemed to be possible to substitute Hunde with Schweine or Säue. The DWB notes the following lexical variations ‘etwas wertvolles vor die hunde (säue, schweine) werfen’ (DWB, s.v. Hund). This variation may also have its origins in Matthew 7: 6 where the forms jmd. gibt etw. den Hunden and jmd. wirft seine Perlen vor die Säue are used next to each other.