Going to the Dogs? A Contrastive Analysis of S.th. is Going to the Dogs and jmd./etw. geht vor die Hunde1

摘要

The paper discusses the origins of equivalent idioms across languages, and specifically the emergence of English s.th. is going to the dogs and German jmd./etw. geht vor die Hunde. Then a contrastive analysis of the two idioms is presented, departing from the assumption that superficially equivalent idioms must exhibit semantic and pragmatic differences. It will be shown that the two idioms differ not only with respect to frequency and register but prefer different external arguments, have different variants, and stand in different relations to other forms in the lexicon.