The idiomaticity of cinegrams or gestures of denial and affirmation: a german-catalan comparative study with corpus methodology

Based on some of Vicent Salvador’s reflections on phraseological units and idiomaticity, this paper analyzes some cinegrams in the covalt corpus. This class of phraseological unit prototypically describes a nonverbal behavior while at the same time verbalizing the meaning conventionally associated with this behavior. The underlying assumption is that there are differences between cinegrams in German and in Catalan due to differences in idiomaticity. To test the assumption, an analysis will show how expressions of denial and affirmation have been translated from German into Catalan, and the results will be compared with a comparable corpus of texts originally written in Catalan.