Open Access

Anna Pavlova

• The paper describes an online German-Russian database for phraseological constructions (PhC), or syntactic idioms. It is a linguistic phenomenon representing a stable multi-word form that usually contains some auxiliary words (“anchors”) and partially opens up empty spaces (“slots”) which are filled directly in spoken language by various lexemes or combinations of lexemes (“fillers”, or “slot fillers”). Linguists from several German institutions are currently working on the database. The PhCs selected for the database have to meet special criteria. The database is a manual that combines scientific descriptions, a thesaurus and a bilingual dictionary. The database is designed as an active aid for text production in the respective foreign language; it is also a manual for language researchers and for translators. Apart from that, it can serve as a basis for extensions for other language pairs. The aim of the project is to record and to describe 300 PhC before the database is published. Our objective is to enable foreign language learners to use the syntactic idioms correctly in the texts they produce rather than create a big-sized database. The paper describes some issues related to the creation of the database, namely objectives and target groups, material and methods, microstructure of the database article and some others.