Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond: Toward a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units

About Elisabeth Piirainen

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 Dobrovolskij). 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.