Going to the Dogs? A Contrastive Analysis of S.th. is Going to the Dogs and jmd./etw. geht vor die Hunde¹Thanks to all of my colleagues who have read and commented on earlier versions of this paper, especially to Christiane Fellbaum, Patrick Hanks, and Undine Kramer. I also want to thank Paul Bogaards who has made valuable comments. I have used the following corpora: the extended DWDS Corpus (around 980 million words), the British National Corpus (around 100 million words) and the Associated Press Corpus (around 150 million words; courtesy of Patrick Hanks) as well as data from the Google Groups. Example sentences from the Google Groups were used because both BNC and Associated Press Corpus did not contain a sufficient number of occurrences of the idiom to allow general statements. Possible differences between BrE and AmE had to be ignored.

Abstract:

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.