idiomaticity, Constructions and Variations - A Corpus-Based Contrastive Approach

Being part of both the lexicon and syntax, idioms constitute a privileged object on which phraseology and construction grammar converge. But the latter tends to emphasize the specificity not only of each construction, but of each language, which would seem to make comparisons between languages pointless. In this article, we propose a contrastive constructionist approach to the structure "ADJ as SN" (cute as a button, free as a bird, etc.) and related structures in French and German. After considering the phraseographic treatment of these expressions, we take a look at them in corpora. These observations seem to show the same mechanism with an undeniable productivity, the systematic nature of which is ignored by phraseography.