DICTIONARY OF IDIOMS IN AUSTRIAN GERMAN

Phraseology has developed into a new and extensive branch of linguistics over the last thirty years. The term "phraseology" refers to the totality of all idioms but also to the branch of linguistics that deals with idioms. Although considerable research has been done in the field of Standard Austrian German phraseology, there is still a lot to be done and consistent and precise statements of first occurrencies or sources of the individual idioms are missing. It is therefore high time to fill this gap and to endeavour to get a comprehensive and systematic collection of idioms used in Austrian German. The term "idiom of Austrian German" in this context means "Austrian German idiomatic phrase that is used and understood by Austrians". The ultimate result of this project will be a database of almost all the occurring Austrian German idioms and a dictionary of these idioms, comprising approximately 10.000 to 15.000 entries. Certain idioms will be selected and followed up to their etymological and semantic roots as well as to their semantic structures. In order to establish a corpus, idioms will be taken from the written language (dissertations, "Diplomarbeiten", linguistic articles and dictionaries, daily papers etc.). Each individual idiom will then be put to the test whether it is known and/or used by Austrian language users in oral speech situations.

The project "Dictionary of Austrian Phraseologie" ("Wörterbuch zur österreichischen Phraseologie") collected in three years of research (after two years of preparing work) about 15.000 phrases in Austrian German, which are not only known but also used by standard speaking Austrians. This phrases were extracted from current Austrian newspapers, periodicals, works of literature, radio and television broadcast, and texts on the internet. About 1.500 speakers answered our large-scale and widespread questionare on their personal use of certain phraeses. Thus we got a thesaurus of about 3.000 phrases in the print version of the project, which are for the first time in history on German in Austria reliable evalueted.