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ISSN: 1549-3652 (Print)
ISSN: 1558-6987 (Online)
Research Article Open Access

Why Construction Grammar Catches the Worm and Corpus Data can Drive you Crazy: Accounting for Idiomatic and Non-Idiomatic Idiomaticity

Thomas Herbst1
  • 1 Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

Abstract

This article outlines why the treatment of idiomatic elements in language in terms of constructions can be considered a real step forward in the understanding of the character of language. It is argued that construction grammar provides a theoretical basis for accommodating insights into the phraseological character of language that were gained in a number of fields such as corpus linguistics, foreign language teaching and traditional phraseology and lexicography.

Journal of Social Sciences
Volume 11 No. 3, 2015, 91-110

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2015.91.110

Submitted On: 7 May 2015 Published On: 11 September 2015

How to Cite: Herbst, T. (2015). Why Construction Grammar Catches the Worm and Corpus Data can Drive you Crazy: Accounting for Idiomatic and Non-Idiomatic Idiomaticity. Journal of Social Sciences, 11(3), 91-110. https://doi.org/10.3844/jssp.2015.91.110

Open AccessCopyright: © 2015 Thomas Herbst. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Keywords

  • Collocation
  • Corpus Analysis
  • Construction
  • Contextualism
  • Electronic Dictionaries
  • Exemplar
  • Foreign Language Teaching
  • Idiom Principle
  • Learner′s Dictionaries
  • Lexicography
  • Probabeme
  • Valency