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Skaistė Volungevičienė

Zum Gebrauch von Konstruktionen in wissenschaftlichen Beiträgen von (nicht-)deutschen Muttersprachlern

Abstract The choice of lexical expression, be it in one’s mother tongue or a foreign language, is determined by our mental lexicon which, apart from single words, contains a range of multi-word fixed expressions. Linguists agree that fixed expressions are very good indicators of language proficiency: a broad range of actively used fixed expressions is typically a sign of a highly proficient language user. When communicating in one’s native language, a language user largely relies on intuition and automatized processing; the use of a foreign language, however, involves the retrieval of consciously learned and internalized material. The current study deals with issues related to the use of fixed expressions by native and non-native language users. The data for this contrastive study has been collected from a corpus of research articles in German on linguistics, consisting of 20 articles written by native and 20 articles written by non-native authors. The articles were published in Lithuania and abroad. The aim of the study is to contrast constructions used by native and non-native authors in terms of frequency and other features and verify the hypothesis that texts written in one’s native language contain a higher proportion of fixed expressions.

The study is based on the theory of construction grammar, which defines fixed expressions as multi-word units recurring frequently in the naturally produced language and having a fixed form and...