Das Wechselspiel zwischen Lexikon und Diskurs.: So genannte Antisprichwörter und die X ist das neue Y-Konstruktion

Based on data mostly taken from corpora of written German language use, this paper analyzes linguistic phenomena of different kinds from the point of view of their schematicity. The focus is, first, directed to proverbs and their contextually adapted variants, to phraseologisms in a broader sense and to other types of expressions that seem to represent structural and functional schemes. Attention is then payed to a particular case of phraseological pattern which is referred to as the X ist das neue Y-construction (‘X is the new Y’-construction). It is argued that a construction grammar approach to language use is most appropriate to account for the different types and degrees of schematicity that can be observed in the data and that it is both more general and more explicit than alternative approaches provided, among others, by paremiologists