Unikale Elementeapuntamentos sobre as palabras ligadas fraseoloxicamente do alemán actual

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to words known as unikale Elemente (unikale Komponenten, Unikalia, phraseologisch gebundene Einheiten) in German, commonly referred to as hapax legomena, cranberry words, or bound words in English. Such words appear only within phraseological units, not in free syntactic constructions. Though they form a (relatively) restricted and closed group of words, they are also quite heterogeneous: not all of them, it turns out, are restricted to the same degree. This project examined the distribution of cranberry words in a large linguistic corpus. In our results, we show that only some of the words proved to be really “unique”