Tra stabilità sintattica e variabilità lessicale. Il caso dei binomi coordinati in tedesco e in italiano

Ilaria Meloni

2024-01-01

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Abstract

Irreversible binomials, called in Italian binomi irreversibili (Masini 2010: 151-152, cf. also Malkiel 1959) and in German Paarformeln, Zwillingsformeln (Burger 2015: 45) or Binomiale (Donalies 2015: 28), belong to the schematic idioms, i.e. fixed, recurrent syntactic structures with variable lexical components (Schafroth 2020: 178). These phrasemes (such as klipp und klar; Sekt oder Selters; frisch, fromm, froehlich, frei in German and forte e chiaro; anima e corpo; tizio, caio e sempronio in Italian) generally consist of two, or more seldom, three or four words belonging to the same grammatical category. These words are connected by semantic-lexical as well as phonological-metric relations and occur in a fixed or "at least preferential" order (Masini 2010: 151), joined by different conjunctions which express structural relations, according to recurrent patterns in different languages. Starting with a list created using lexicographic sources, this contribution aims to describe and examine some of the numerous syntactical and semantic relationships of such phrasemes from a cross-linguistic perspective as well as to investigate, using two corpora of written German and Italian, whether and what variations are possible despite the well-known structural cohesion. Finally, the differences between phrasemes and other syntactic structures will be discussed.