Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond

A linguist working with German, Dutch, and Indo-European generally, Piirainen identifies linguistic idioms that are common to many or most European languages. She collaborated with 250 scholars who are competent in 74 European and 17 non-European languages to identify a good 380 idioms that are truly widespread and can form the core of a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units. She discusses half of them in detail in this volume, selecting idioms that can be traced back to identifiable textual sources and so can be analyzed in terms of intertextuality. After theoretical and methodological matters, the arrangement is by source, among them antiquity, the Bible, Medieval and Reformation proverbs, and fables and legends. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Elisabeth Piirainen received her PhD in German studies, Dutch philology, and Indo-European and general linguistics from the University of Munster, Germany. She has been a lecturer at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and a leader of projects on dialect research in Westphalia, Germany. Her intensive examination of a Low German dialect culminated in Phraseologie der westmunsterlandischen Mundart (2000, 2 volumes), the first study on dialectal phraseology within a linguistic framework and recipient of the Johannes Sass Prize. This resulted in many further studies on phraseology, among them Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (2005, with Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij). Her publications have covered numerous different languages (including German, Dutch, English, Swedish, French, Russian, Greek, Finnish, Japanese) and a variety of fields, such as dialectal and areal phraseology, gender specifics, puns, the cultural foundation of conventional figurative language, and idioms in a European framework. Her knowledge of various languages, her familiarity with field research, as well as her long-standing expertise in phraseology research have allowed her to launch this large-scale project on widespread idioms.