1984 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages 317-328
It is certain that words exist on the premise that they are accompanied by what is called 'meaning', but in a number of respects the relationship between words and their meanings is very complicated e g. the combination or connection of words is based on the speaker's verbal experience. This fact is true not only for the right lexical understanding but also for the grammatical meaning or a word's function within the sentence (for example: lexical meaning: "Crossroad ahead!"-transferred meaning: "She stood at the crossroad of her life. " Grammatical function: "She is pretty." but "He is a pretty old man.") As soon as we enter the field of idiomatical expressions, when words are combined to form new meanings and their new meanings cannot be understood by looking at the single meanings of all the components, then we have to leave the ground of a well ordered semantical system. In this study I divided some groups of idiomatic expressions according to a more or less semantical aspect based on the grade of exchangability of the components and the grade of closeness or distance of the whole meaning compared to the total meaning of all single components. In order to understand idiomatical expressions from their origins, I divided them into several groups according to the 'picture' that is implied. In a following study, that will be published later, I will compare German idiomatic expressions with their counterparts in some other European languages, asking to what extent we can speak of a common 'European mind' concerning idiomatic pictures, and to what extent we can evaluate typical German thoughts. French analogies or English imagination.
