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The paper discusses the origins of equivalent idioms across languages, and specifically the emergence of English s.th. is going to the dogs and German jmd./etw. geht vor die Hunde. Then a contrastive analysis of the two idioms is presented, departing from the assumption that superficially equivalent idioms must exhibit semantic and pragmatic differences. It will be shown that the two idioms differ not only with respect to frequency and register but prefer different external arguments, have different variants, and stand in different relations to other forms in the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we explore the collocations and semantics of light verbs in German and propose a new kind of monolingual German dictionary entry for such verbs, paying equal attention to phraseology and meaning. As a rule of thumb, we follow the semantic criterion that the meaning of a light verb is more than usually bound up with its collocations (which, typically, are few in number and high in frequency). We consider problems of terminology and criteria. A corpus-based analysis of three verbs (leisten, erteilen, and hegen) is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]