The first studies on contrastive phraseology (CF) were published in the 1970s and from the 1990s onwards, CF became a discipline and has been the subject of numerous studies both from a theoretical perspective and from a perspective applied to translatology, lexicography and second language teaching. But there is no doubt that the establishment of the European Society of Phraseology (EUROPHRAS) in 1999 in Bielefeld (Germany) has been a real boost for phraseological research in Europe, and in these first years of the 21st century there has been an unprecedented growth in phraseology and CF. 

For the German-Spanish language pair, the first works came to light in the 80s thanks to the Hispanist Gerd Wotjak and the Germanist Barbara Wotjak. It was from the second half of the 90s onwards that phraseological studies comparing Spanish with other languages, especially German, proliferated. The members of this research group published their first contributions to this discipline at that time, focusing on the following fields: phraseodidactics German-Spanish, the question of equivalence in CF German-Spanish at a systemic and textual level, the translation of phraseological units. 

With the contribution of cognitive linguistics and taking corpus linguistics as a basis, a new approach is given to the discipline, achieving reliable quantitative and qualitative results. For this reason, in the latest work of the members of this research group, CF studies have been carried out based on the following corpora:

• CREA 
• COSMAS II 
• Sketch engine

Thus, taking corpus linguistics as a basis, the research activity will focus on the following thematic areas of CF German-Spanish:

• Phraseological universals such as phraseologically linked words (single elements).
• Translation of phraseological units.
• Interculturality: semantic-cultural aspects. 
• Pragmatics in CF German-Spanish. 
• Phraseology German-Spanish.

University education