Contrastive Corpus Research in Bilingual Phraseography

Resumen

The paper discusses linguistic issues presenting difficulties for bilingual lexicography. The purpose of the study is to use data of parallel English and Russian corpora for description of non-trivial features of English phraseological constructions on the brink of / on the threshold of in comparison with their Russian equivalents на Ðрани / на пороÐе in the process of compiling of an English-Russian phraseological dictionary. Some ideas of construction grammar are applied as theoretical basis of this research work. The analysis of usage frequency of phraseological constructions applying statistical methods is put forward in this work. The results of the study show that the use of parallel corpora helps to reveal specific character of their functional correlations and non-trivial semantic preferences of English phraseological constructions which do not have standard Russian equivalences. The need for a new dictionary is motivated by the fact that at present there are no English-Russian phraseological dictionaries based on corpora and authentic data in international lexicography. The use of corpora helps to provide new vision of a contextual behavior of phraseological constructions and restrictions of their usage, which is very important for the purposes of lexicographic description.