Speaker
Description
Dictionaries are widely regarded as authoritative linguistic resources that play a central role in shaping and legitimising language use in society (Haß-Zumkehr 2001). Beyond their descriptive function, they act as social agents influencing public perceptions and norms (Gouws 2022) and must therefore be understood as socially embedded artefacts reflecting linguistic, cultural, and societal values (Müller-Spitzer 2023). This perspective is particularly relevant for gender representation, as lexicographic descriptions of personal referents such as woman and man have repeatedly been shown to reproduce asymmetrical and stereotypical patterns across languages (Hidalgo 2000; Kotthoff & Nübling 2018; Flood 2019; Diewald & Nübling 2022). Corpus-based studies, for instance, reveal systematic gendered asymmetries in adjectival co-occurrences, with men frequently characterised as rich or strong and women as beautiful or pregnant (Müller-Spitzer 2024). Public debates surrounding dictionary revisions, notably those concerning the Oxford Dictionaries (Flood 2019), further underscore the social impact of lexicographic decisions.
While previous research has primarily focused on individual lemmas and their typical co-occurrence patterns, the phraseological level remains comparatively underexplored in studies on gender representation. In particular, the categorisation and lexicographic treatment of idioms, semi-idioms, and collocations have received limited systematic attention (Burger et al. 2007; Burger 2015; Schafroth 2019). Existing analyses largely rely on condensed printed dictionaries, where phraseologisms may be typographically highlighted within single-word entries or occur unmarked in example sentences, complicating their identification and classification (Moon 2007; Steyer 2008; Hollós 2017). Even in comparable dictionaries, the selection, classification, and presentation of phraseological units frequently diverge (Moon 2007).
These challenges are further intensified in digital lexicography, where spatial constraints no longer apply and lexicographic practices vary considerably across platforms and languages (Gouws 2014; 2018; 2022; Klosa-Kückelhaus & Gouws 2015; Klosa-Kückelhaus 2024). Based on a manually compiled corpus drawn from selected German and English online dictionaries, comparable phraseologisms are frequently labelled, defined, positioned, or exemplified differently, or remain entirely unlabeled, directly affecting their identification in contrastive research. A case in point is the German semi-idiom gefallenes Mädchen, which appears as a separate hyperlinked entry under Mehrwortausdrücke in the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), but occurs without any phraseological label in the example section of the Duden Online-Wörterbuch entry Mädchen. Its English equivalent fallen woman is treated equally inconsistently, appearing as a separate entry under Other results in Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries and under More results in Longman English Dictionary, again without explicit phraseological labelling.
Against this background, the present research addresses a theoretical and methodological gap in digital lexicography by proposing a contrastive framework for the identification, classification, and analysis of idioms, semi-idioms, and collocations with gender representations in German and English online dictionaries. The study is based on a manually curated contrastive lexicographic corpus compiled from selected online dictionaries and structured around a predefined set of key lemmas referring to socially defined personal roles, including general designations, family relations, romantic relationships, and social roles. The corpus-building process combines lemma-based extraction with manual phraseological annotation and cross-linguistic alignment. Phraseologisms were identified according to semantic opacity, degree of lexical fixation, and recurrent co-occurrence patterns, while the comparison across dictionaries focused on four analytical dimensions: phraseological labelling, positioning within entries, definitional treatment, and exemplification practices.
By foregrounding these methodological steps, the contribution outlines the compilation of a contrastive lexicographic corpus and demonstrates how inconsistencies in online dictionary structures require interpretative decisions during corpus annotation. It then examines how phraseological units are treated in major German platforms (e.g., DWDS, Duden) and English learner’s dictionaries (e.g., Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, Longman), highlighting systematic differences in lexicographic practice.
The analysis reveals recurring cross-linguistic and platform-specific divergences in the treatment of phraseological units and gender representation. To address these inconsistencies, the paper proposes a flexible comparative annotation model that distinguishes between the lexicographic treatment of a unit (e.g., labelled or unlabelled, embedded or listed separately) and its linguistic properties as a phraseologism. This approach allows formally comparable units to be analysed despite divergent dictionary structures. The findings demonstrate that collocations pose particular methodological difficulties because their status as phraseologisms often remains implicit and platform-dependent. More broadly, the study argues that contrastive phraseological research in digital lexicography requires transparent annotation criteria and platform-sensitive analytical categories in order to account for the variability of online dictionary practices.