Medieval Traces in German Phraseological Units

Abstract

The present work tries to explore the presence of traces of the cultural heritage corresponding to a past as distant as the Middle Ages, which are hidden in a large number of standard, habitually used phraseological units of the German language. This análisis is framed within the concept of cultural lexicon introduced by Galisson (1989), in which words are not understood in isolation, according to the morphosyntactic parameters of the language. Instead, words constitute living components of a certain culture that unravel customs, traditions and ways of acting of the people who speak it. In the context of a mixed line of research, where both quantitative and qualitative methods are used, all the locutions that refer to the culture of the Middle Ages are sought in the same dictionary on idioms, sayings, proverbs and colloquial language (Corpas Pastor, 1996). From a sample of 95 lexical units, the phrases are classified into 16 different categories, according to socio-cultural aspects of the time. In turn, we determine the categories with the greatest number of locutions which are related to customs and traditions, the world view, the judicial system and beliefs. The etymological description of the phrases is important for the teaching learning of foreign languages, as it allows us to understand the opaque meanings of the phraseologies in order to improve communicative competence.