Annegret Gelbrecht

Phraseology in Intercultural Communication: A contrastive approach towards German and English phraseological units of fire and water Annegret Gelbrecht

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Erfurt (Philosophische Fakultät - Fachbereich Anglistik), course: Intercultural Communications, language: English, abstract: "Idioms, the colourful side of languages, are one of the symbols used while we are communicating our thoughts and feelings. They are used to give life and richness to the language by taking the existing words, combining them in a new sense, and creating new meanings, just like a work of art." (LEN-NON, 1998, cited in BULUT; ÇELIK-YAZICI, 2004: 105) This combination of existing words "like a work of art" represents a huge challenge for non-native speakers they have to cope with in their language learning process. In the context of intercultural communication, non-native and native speakers interact with each other and often make use of idioms and other fixed expressions as "the colourful side of languages", because they are used to it from their usual communication in their first languages. However, these fixed expressions constitute a special part of the language use due to particular characteristics, which will be explored further in this term paper. Consequently, communication between non-native and native speakers does not always runs smoothly when phraseological language comes into play. Amongst others, the cultural boundedness as well as native-like creative exploitations of the fixed expressions represent probable causes for misunderstandings. These aspects will be presented hereafter. Given the limited space of this term paper, the focus is on communication between non-native and native speakers. Phenomenon connected to the phraseological language in a lingua franca setting cannot be examined further. Within the scope of intercultural communication, contrastive linguistics is one approach towards interactions across language borders. "Contrastive linguistics focuses on pairs of languages and explores similar