Twin formula
The characteristic of twin formulas (also called pair formulas or binomials ) is a formulaic, common occurrence of two words connected by “and” (or other connectors ) in the form “A and B”. The term “twin formula” is mainly used in folklore , while the term “pair formula” dominates in the historiography of legal language .
Linguistic and rhetorical aspects
Twin formulas are expressions that always or predominantly appear as phraseologisms . When creating twin formulas, rhetorical style figures such as oxymoron or pleonasm are often used. Accordingly, the word components can be semantically related to one another in different ways and antonyms (e.g. up and down, good and bad, hot and cold, cat and mouse, day and night ), synonyms (e.g. fear and anxiety, kind and Wise, woe and oh ) or identical (e.g. hand in hand, little by little, step by step, side by side, step by step ). Mere associative connections of similar terms to more or less irreversible phrases (e.g. pitch and sulfur, space and time, forest and meadow ) are also common.
Depending on whether the two parts of the word only together give the actual meaning of the expression (for example, belongings for "possession") or whether taken alone have the same meaning as the entire expression, which as a whole only fulfills a rhetorical reinforcement function (for example manner ), one speaks of a Hendiadyoin or a tautology . Many twin formulas contain poetic style elements such as stick-rhyming alliterations (e.g. under and over, frank and free, commonplace, blunt and clear, betrayed and sold ), assonances (e.g. give and take, rank and name ) or rhyming elements (e.g. lie and deceit, booze and booze, slim and slim ), which make it immediately recognizable for the language user (and linguistic layperson) as a fixed formula (" phrase ") and facilitate memorization .
In legal language , pair formulas often combine two closely related, but at least historically or formally differentiated terms into a topos (e.g. bulk and arch, form and deadline, land, trade and change, house and yard, year and Day , child and cone , body and life, measure and weight , murder and manslaughter, class and class, good faith , hand over and hand over, knowledge and conscience ).
In 1989, Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon formulated several principles that shape the inner structure of binomials and traced them back to the economy of the constant flow of information. This basic principle is responsible, among other things, for the fact that in binomials the more frequent element usually precedes the less frequent (“high frequency before low frequency”).
Triplet and quadruple formulas
In a similar way, but less often, triplets (e.g. secret, quiet and quiet or wine, woman and song ) and occasionally quadruple formulas (e.g. fresh, pious, happy and free ) are formed in the German language . The frequency of such linguistic figures depends heavily on the rhythmic and structural characteristics of the respective language . In Chinese , for example, phraseological quadruplets form a very strong group.
literature
- Harald Burger , with the assistance of Harald Jaschke: Idiomatik des Deutschen. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1973, ISBN 3-484-25018-6 , chapter pair formulas , pages 42-48.
- John M. Jeep: Pair formulas . In: Concise dictionary on German legal history. 2nd, completely revised and enlarged edition. Volume IV, 2020, Col. 289-294.
- Wolfgang Fleischer : Phraseology of contemporary German. 2nd, revised and supplemented edition. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-484-73032-3 , chapter phraseological word pairs , pages 106-109.
- Hans-Georg Müller : eagle eye and lynx ear. German twin formulas and their usage. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-59764-4 ( doi: 10.3726 / 978-3-653-02105-9 ) (analysis and dictionary with approx. 2000 examples).
Web links
- Wernfried Hofmeister: Twin formulas in contemporary German . ( Memento from July 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 68 kB) List, as of June 25, 2010
- further examples