On the Problem of Lexicographical Representation of Productive Phraseological Patterns (As Shown by Modern Greek Constructional Phrasemes)

Abstract

This paper discusses the problems of lexicographical representation of Modern Greek constructional phrasemes – productive phraseological patterns with one or more variable components (slots).
 The analysis of Modern Greek general and phraseological dictionaries has shown that, in Modern Greek lexicography, there is no unified approach towards the description of this type of phraseologisms. One of the significant problems associated with lexicographical treatment of Modern Greek constructional phrasemes is that some of them are registered in dictionaries as fully fixed expressions with their slot(s) filled with a specific lexeme or a specific proposition, without any indication that these expressions possess a variable component. Such lexicographical representation of productive phraseological patterns does not reflect the real linguistic usage and does not allow the reader of the dictionary to understand that the expressions described in the dictionary as fully fixed show considerable variation and possess one or two slots that can be filled with a wide range of words or word combinations.
 The corpus analysis of the constructional phraseme Ούτε να Ρ (literally, ‘neither if’), which is registered in Modern Greek dictionaries in five different, all fully lexically specified forms, has shown that the specific realizations of this productive phraseological pattern included in the dictionaries either have relatively low frequency of occurrence in the corpus, or are not encountered in the corpus at all. Other realizations of this phraseological pattern account for over 92 % of all the cases of its use in the corpus, but the common pattern behind them can hardly be identified with the help of the existing lexicographical descriptions, as it is registered in the dictionaries under the lemmas of five different lexemes that do not form part of its fixed component.
 Based on the findings of this study, the paper raises the issue of developing a new approach towards the description of productive phraseological patterns that currently pose a significant challenge for adequate lexicographical representation.