Grazer Linguistische Monographien 6

The vocabulary of a language consists of words and their bound combinations, generally and lossely referred to idioms. They are studied by a branch of Linguistics called Phraseology. Phraseology, besides, is also the term for the sum total of the bound word-combinations of a language. Speakers and writers use them because of their vividly expressive conciseness, because they hit the bull right in the eye helping to avoid circumlocutions, or because of their emotive charge, emotive connotations, stylistic colouring. Yet phraseology is much more than a linguistic embellishment, a verbal short cut, a witticism. Phraseology is the archival material of a language community´s history.