oa Contrastieve fraseologie en corpora: een experiment met de zee / la mer

Phraseology, the study of all categories of set phrases, has now come to be seen as a major research field within linguistics. It also shows a clear relation„ship with many aspects of corpus linguistics and construction grammar. Some of the most interesting features of phraseology come from a contrastive perspective: the comparison between set phrases in two or more languages. While there is a general agreement that the phraseology of one particular language will be influenced by its culture and traditions, the precise methodology that should be used for contrastive phraseology remains uncertain. In this paper we report the results of an experiment designed to assess whether automated programs, applied to large linguistic corpora, will enable us to extract conclusive evidence for contrastive phraseology. The scope of the experiment is limited to phrases in combination with la mer (French) / de zee (Dutch). The results suggest that the recourse to automated tools is quite useful, while some aspects still have to be dealt with by traditional dictionary search. As far as the case study is concerned, sea phrases in Dutch and French appear to display fewer differences than might have been expected from the historical and cultural background of both languages.