Variability of German Idioms and the Difficulties of Its Vocabulary Description
The article is based upon German idioms and deals with the issue of variability in their component structure and its lexicographic description. Via corpus analysis, new variants of idioms can be detected, which have not previously been described in dictionaries. Corpus analysis also makes it possible to differentiate between separate idioms, each demanding a separate dictionary entry, and variants of the same idiom, as well as between occasional and usual variants, and to decide, whether the varying word is and should be described as a component of the idiom in the dictionary, or is just a modifier used together with the idiom.