Lexicon of Common Figurative Units

Elisabeth Piirainen received her Ph.D. in German philology and 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. She has written 10 books and 130 articles. One focus of her work is idioms of endangered languages; cf. her two-volume study on phraseology of a Low German basis dialect (2000) and her (co)editorship of Endangered Metaphors (2012) and Language Endangerment (2015). Other topics are theory of conventional figurative language, idiom motivation, cultural foundation of figurative lexical units, and her large-scale research project “Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond.”

• Preface – Introduction – Theater, Music, Sports and Games – History and War – Intellectual and Technical Achievements – Special Concepts of the World – Cultural Symbols – Material Culture, Money and Living – Forces of Nature, Weather, Plants and Animals – Time and Space – Gestures, Postures and Facial Expressions – Physical Reactions and Sensation – The Human Body – Textual Sources from Ancient, Medieval and Modern Times—Supplement to "WI Volume I" – Quotations, Terms and Views of Recent Modern Times – Conclusions and Main Results – References – Abbreviations of the Language Names – Indexes – List of Participants.