Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond

Elisabeth Piirainen received her PhD in German studies, Dutch philology, and Indo-European and general linguistics from the University of Münster, Germany. She has been a lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and a leader of projects on dialect research in Westphalia, Germany. Her intensive examination of a Low German dialect culminated in Phraseologie der westmünsterländischen Mundart (2000, 2 volumes), the first study on dialectal phraseology within a linguistic framework and recipient of the Johannes Sass Prize. This resulted in many further studies on phraseology, among them Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (2005, with Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij). Her publications have covered numerous different languages (including German, Dutch, English, Swedish, French, Russian, Greek, Finnish, Japanese) and a variety of fields, such as dialectal and areal phraseology, gender specifics, puns, the cultural foundation of conventional figurative language, and idioms in a European framework. Her knowledge of various languages, her familiarity with field research, as well as her long-standing expertise in phraseology research have allowed her to launch this large-scale project on widespread idioms.