Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 138
MILLI MÁLA
Milli mála 13/2021 137
Abstract
Kurz und bündig, raso y corto or stutt og laggott:
On binomial pairs in German, Spanish, and Icelandic
This article aims to study linguistic binomials in Icelandic, Spanish
and German. Binomial pairs belong to set phraseological multi-
word sequences, and belong to field of the Phraseology. Here the
main characteristics and categories of the binomial pairs found in
the aforementioned languages are discussed.
Linguistic binomials have a binary structure, i.e. they are a se-
quence of two words which belong to the same grammatical cate-
gory and form a pair joined by connectors (word + connector +
word). The lexical elements which form the word pair are nouns,
verbs, adjectives, adverbs or pronouns. The connectors can be coor-
dinating conjunctions (holt og bolt) or prepositions (dag eftir dag), for
example. The binomial pairs that were found in the three languag-
es in focus belong to all the aforementioned categories and share the
same structural and semantic relationships. The binomials were
classified according to: a) the structure, such as the word class and
the connectors (ár og dagar, uña y mugre, Lug und Trug), b) the rhyth-
mical and stylistic characteristics, e.g. alliteration, rhyme and
rhythm (fjöll og firnindi, arga og garga, tirios y troyanos, troche y moche,
klipp und klar, hüben und drüben) and c) the semantic relationship of
the lexical members, for instance synonyms, quasi synonyms, anto-
nyms and lexical field (bölva og ragna, upphaf og endir, dueño y señor,
toma y daca, bitten und bettlen, Leiden und Freuden).
Through the centuries the usage of binomial pairs has enriched
and added expressiveness to languages. This applies to the three
languages focused on in this study.
Keywords: Binomial pairs, phraseology, German, Icelandic, Spanish
ERLA ERLENDSDÓTTIR OG ODDNÝ G. SVERRISDÓTTIR