“Seasoned” Phraseological Units: A Comparative Study in German and Romanian

Abstract

The present study subsumes the ethno-linguistics, which in Eugen Coseriu’sterms, is aiming at the study of language variety and variation in close contact withcivilization and culture of a community. This article examines German and Romanianphrasemes with spice compounds, found through lexicographical research on multilingualphraseological dictionaries. Drawing on lexicographical material (a small-sized corpus ofGerman and Romanian phrasemes with spice compounds), the present study investigatesthe correspondence between their symbolic and phraseological meaning and makesa contrastive comparison to exemplify the cultural embedding of the phrasemes. Culinarynames belong to the main lexical bulk of a language and that is why they are often usedin phraseology. The study investigates the phraseological motivation of these sequences,especially the common sources of the German and Romanian phraseology.