Phraseology and Linguistic Theory a Brief Survey . Introduction

This chapter has three objectives. First, it argues in favor of more rigorous definitions of the term 'phraseologism' on the basis of six dimensions and exemplifies these dimensions for several different kinds of phraseologism. Second, it reviews the ways in which phraseologisms as defined here have figured in three different linguistic approaches: generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Finally, it discusses some shortcomings in the identification of phraseologisms and points to relevant work to overcome these shortcomings. Interest in phraseology has grown considerably over the last twenty years or so. While the general linguists' view of phraseology before that time can probably be caricatured as 'idiom researchers and lexicographers classifying and researching various kinds of fairly frozen idiomatic expressions' , this view has thankfully changed. Nowadays, the issues of identifying and classifying phraseologisms as well as integrating them into theoretical research and practical application has a much more profound influence on researchers and their agendas in many different sub-disciplines of linguistics as well as in language learning, acquisition, and teaching, natural language processing, etc. However, this influence is often not fully recognized or acknowledged, or reflected ter-minologically. This is undesirable, not only because it is often not easy to recognize the domains where research on phraseology has left its marks, but also because it renders the overlap of assumptions, concepts, and findings less transparent than is desirable. This chapter attempts to take a modest step in this direction. I will try to identify and make explicit six crucial dimensions, or defining parameters, of phraseol-ogisms. I think these actually underlie most phraseological work – if only implicitly – but I would like phraseologists to always be maximally explicit about which parameter settings are adopted in order to (i) render their definitions maximally precise and (ii) allow researchers from other frameworks to more easily recognize potential areas of overlap, or indeed conflict. In Section 3 I will then use the suggested parameters to discuss the role phraseologisms have played in different linguistic frameworks, viz. transformational-generative grammar, cognitive linguistics and Final proof corrections p. 4 of the document / p. 6 of the volume, penultimate line: old: beginning with <s n=) new: beginning with "<s n=") p. 11 of the document / p. 13 of the volume, first point of bulleted list: old: as long as a form is paired with a meaning new: as long as the forms in the expression …