Reviewed by Kon Kuiper, University of Canterbury

One can find out a good deal about a field and the predilections of an author by looking at a text for the field written by that author. This short text is a fine way to find out about phraseology as a continental European discipline. Phraseology is the study of the items in the phrasal lexicon and their use, and Fiedler provides a useful overview of some of the topics that phraseologists research.

Ch. 1 deals with the properties of phrasal lexical items: their stability over time, the processes of lexicalization, idiomaticity as a graded property, the connotations of phrasal lexical items, their resistance or otherwise to syntactic movement rules and other idiosyncratic behavior. The chapter illustrates properties typical of lexical items in that they are concerned with idiosyncrasies of kinds that one might expect given that these are lexical items with phrase structure. They can thus have phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic idiosyncrasies.

Ch. 2 provides a taxonomy of types of phrasal lexical items based on a number of their properties. For example, irreversible binomials of various kinds are illustrated as are lexicalized comparatives. Here the classification is one based on syntactic structure.  Proverbs, winged words, and routine formulae are distinguished on the basis of their associated conditions of use. In other sections phrasal-lexical items are distinguished on the basis of having particular constituents such as color words, body part names, or proper names. Such taxonomies are typical of standard European treatments of phraseology in being atheoretical.

Ch. 3 looks at the use of phrasal lexical items in various text types such as newspapers, magazines, and literary texts, and it illustrates how they can be played with in various forms of lexical deformation for stylistic and humorous effect. This chapter and the next are full of well-chosen examples, some of them illustrated.

Ch. 4 examines the problems that translators face in translating phrasal lexical items. The first significant problem is recognizing the item. Even native speakers often do not recognize a phrasal-lexical item in varieties of their language with which they are not familiar. This is so much more problematic for speakers who are not native speakers. If one supposes that a native speaker knows some hundreds of thousands of phrasal lexical items in his or her own language, then it is not surprising that a nonnative speaker would know a great many fewer and thus not be able to recognize them in a text that he or she is translating. Even with restricted collocations that are fully compositional, picking the equivalent collocation in a language one knows well but not very well can lead to a characteristic lack of native-like texture. F is very helpful in showing how different translators have different ways of dealing with phrasal lexical items when these have been accurately identified. Workarounds are almost always compromises.

Each chapter in this course text is accompanied by exercises of varying difficulty, ranging from Ph.D.-level topics to simple dictionary-based tasks. Answers are given at the end of the book. The exercises are thought-provoking and are not graded. One can imagine students finding some very difficult indeed. The book is written in English but is used in the German market as a course book.  It is now one of a handful of such texts written in both English and German for phraseology courses.

For those in Anglophone linguistics this is a useful book to begin the exploration of Continental phraseology.