The Lemmatisation of Idioms

The question of how idioms should be lemmatised is a fundamental issue in the lexicographic treatment of idioms and has been the focus of much debate ever since the first International Symposium on Lexicography. Several proposals for a systematic lexico-graphic treatment of idioms have been put forward (e.g. Cowie 1981, Burger 1983, Braasch 1988, Schemann 1991, Burger 1998 etc.). In this paper, we examine how semi- and non-literal idioms are lemmatised in some of the most widely-known dictionaries of German, English and Dutch. In what follows, we confine ourselves to the treatment of idioms in mono- and bilingual general dictionaries which are alphabetically ordered. Since the lexical status of idioms is relevant to the way in which idioms should be lemmatised, we shall first be concerned with the status of idioms as units of the lexicon