Pluricentric German and the Non-Predominant National and State Variants. Quantitative Empirical and Functionally Applied Aspects of Phraseology

The article deals with the analysis of the phraseological units belonging to the non-predominant national state variants of the standard literary pluricentric German language. The historical stages of theoretical understanding of the problem are studied and weak points and desiderata of the interpretation of this phenomenon in the scientific literature are identified. Problems in the selection and empirical analysis of linguistic material and its lexicographic codification are highlighted. The author's concept of non-dominant types of national-state variation of the standard literary language is taken as a basis, to distinguish it from narrowly regional, diatopic-dialectal, non-normative-deviant ones. A classification of phraseological variants into full national variants (phraseological Austrianisms and Helvetisms par excellence), full regional variants, regional semi-variants of Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, South Tyrol, Eastern Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine, and cluster variants is proposed. Based on the lexicography excerption an attempt was made to verify and precisely qualify by means of informants` interviewing and quantitative corpus search the lexicographic and textual data in order to describe more adequately the German idiomatic thesaurus abroad Germany. Based on the results of the experiment, “pure” Austrianisms and Helvetisms, analogical-synonymous and cluster idiomatic units were identified. Among them, according to the results of quantitative analysis, systemically-usualized, occasional and archaic phraseologisms were differentiated and a hypothesis was formulated about the possible factors of the processes of functioning of the studied linguistic units in the modern German-speaking communicative space. The hypothesis about the fundamental divergence of state borders and language areas and a special type of national-state language standard-normative variation, which requires constantly updated codification, was empirically verified.