In the persistently sparse interlingual studies in the field of Construction Grammar, grammatical constructions are the main concern of research (Koch 2016; Boas and Ziem 2018), while constructional idioms, defined as form–meaning pairings with lexically fixed constituents and free lexical slots, have been analyzed mainly monolingually, with very few exceptions. See, amongst others, Dobrovol’skij
... [Show full abstract] and Pöppel (2017), Mollica and Schafroth (2018) and Mellado Blanco et al. (forthcoming).
This lack of studies from a contrastive point of view may be related to the lexical underspecification of constructional idioms and to the difficulties in assessing their often high pragmatic potential. Against this background, the present paper aims to give impetus to the contrastive studies in the field of constructional idioms and Construction Grammar by means of the language pair German–Spanish. In order to achieve this goal, a multi-level corpus-based description method for the determination and analysis of interlingual equivalent constructional idioms at the lexicographical level was developed using five comparison parameters. The contrastive description model was successfully implemented on the comparative constructional idiom [ von A so viel verstehen/Ahnung haben/sich auskennen wie X von/vom Y] (‘von A absolut nichts verstehen’) ([ from A V to have as much understanding / knowledge as X from Y] (‘to understand absolutely nothing from A’)) and on its functionally equivalent construction in Spanish [ Ventender/saber de A lo (mismo) que/como yo de X]. Both comparative constructions are characterized by their negation value and a pronounced ironic meaning, respectively. Their intralingual description from a constructional grammatical point of view represents a further goal of this paper.
