LEXICAL DUALS. TYPOLOGICAL IDEAS REGARDING TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS OF GERMAN 'BEIDE' IN CROSS LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

ALexical duals are expressions which are assigned lexeme status and whose semantic description involves the feature (two). In contrast to grammatical duals, lexical duals have not been in the focus of cross-linguistic research. The paper tries to demonstrate that it makes sense typologically to compare lexical duals in the languages of the world. The authors provide a pilot study of translation equivalents of English both in a sample of 120 languages world-wide. This survey of the formal interrelationship of expressions of BOTH and TWO is complemented by four case-studies on lexical duals in Norwegian, Maltese, Ukrainian and Georgian. The authors discuss markedness relations and the structural properties of four language types which emerge from a detailed analysis of lexical duals.