Contrastive phraseology German–Spanish Research Group (FRASCAE)
The first studies on contrastive phraseology (CF) were published in the 1970s. From the 1990s onwards, CF has been a discipline in its own right, and the subject of numerous studies from both a theoretical perspective and one applied to translation studies, lexicography and second language teaching. However, the establishment of the European Society of Phraseology (EUROPHRAS) in 1999 in Bielefeld (Germany) has undoubtedly been a significant turning point for phraseological studies research in Europe. In the early years of the 21st century, there has been an unprecedented growth in phraseology and CF.
The first works on the German–Spanish pair were published in the 1980s by Gerd Wotjak, a Hispanist, and Barbara Wotjak, a Germanist. From the second half of the 1990s onwards, phraseological studies contrasting Spanish with other languages, especially with German, became increasingly prevalent.
At this time, the members of this research group published their inaugural contributions to this discipline, which focused on the following areas: German–Spanish phraseodidactics, the equivalence in German–Spanish CF at the systemic and textual levels, as well as the translation of phraseological units. Their work also incorporated cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, leading to the development of a new approach to the discipline that yielded reliable quantitative and qualitative results.
In the most recent work of the Research Group, studies based on the CREA COSMAS II Sketch engine corpora have been carried out.Therefore, the group’s research activity will be focused on the following thematic areas of German–Spanish CF, taking corpus linguistics as a basis: phraseological universals, such as phraseologically linked words (single elements); the translation of phraseological units; interculturality (semantic-cultural aspects); pragmatics in German–Spanish CF; and German–Spanish phraseology.
