This article focuses a certain type of phraseological construction that has only been marginally investigated in phraseological research so far: productive, partially schematic units that go back to lexically fully specified phrasemes that, due to the popularity of the modification of certain positions, have developed over time into phrasemes with conceptual slot positions that require a separate cognitive anchoring, i.e. constitute an independent lexicon entry. On the basis of an exemplary selection of German proverbs like Ein Unglück kommt selten allein (lit. ‘A misfortune never comes alone’) that are taken from the “Sprichwörterbuch” of the IDS-dictionary platform OWID (vgl. SWB), it will be shown that through serially and systematically operated modification processes, proverbs have even created a considerable amount of semischematic patterns that are used more or less productively. With recourse to Stumpf’s (2016) distinction between modification patterns (“Modifikationsmuster”) and phraseological schemata (“Modellbildungen”) it will be argued, on empirical grounds, that said patterns underly different degrees of productivity and schematicity in that some of them represent only ‘modification series’ of the lexically specified proverb base (and thus are located as a phenomenon on the parole level) and others constitute ‘true’ phraseological constructions with an intrinsic vacancy structure that expand the lexicon (and therefore have the status of a system-level phenomenon). The central method used here are ‘slot analyses’, carried out by the corpus linguistic tool Lexpan (Steyer & Brunner 2014), which allows for the differentiation of modified and schematic phrasemes on the basis of certain frequency values. In addition, ‘timeline graphs’ (Lüngen & Keibel 2014) are used, which can be particularly useful in classifying transition phenomena by visualizing the annual development of modifications over the last decades.
