Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort: Analisi Intra- e Interlinguistica

The present research aims to describe the German pragmatic phraseme Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort (‘No answer is also an answer’) from an intralingual perspective delineating its formal and functional features and, more specifically, its internal and external syntactic behaviour as well as its illocutionary force. In addition to its fixed and lexicalised form, the focus will be placed also on the “partially lexically filled constructions” (Goldberg 2006) [Kein(e) N1 ist auch ein(e) N1] ‘No N1 is also a N1’, i.e., a more abstract construction which is partially lexicalized and used in specific speech acts. With recourse to corpus data, the noun classes that more frequently occupy the N1 position will be identified. The phraseme Keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort will be analysed also from an interlingual perspective; the problem of the equivalents in Italian will reflected upon and discussed.