Abstract
This thesis is a contrastive analysis of Russian and Danish idioms of biblical origin in modern news language. The thesis is divided into three parts: the theory/methodology part, the analysis part and the phraseography part. This structure supports the two main objectives of the thesis, which are related to phraseology and phraseography, just as it takes account of the strong focus on methodological and theoretical issues.

Some of the thesis concerns a number of theoretical and methodological aspects characterising this type of study (contrastive). The objective of the theoretical-methodological part is to uncover some problematic terms used in phraseology research and ensure that the scientific basis of study is as reliable as possible. On the basis of a critical discussion of some of the existing terms and the confusion of concepts within this specialist field, a precise definition of the study's central term – idiom (idiomatic expression) is given, including a clarification of the distinctive features of the idiom. This also comprises a discussion of a number of the empirical sources traditionally used for establishing an idiomatic source basis. Based on this discussion, a new, alternative combination method will be presented for the establishment of an idiomatic source basis in Danish and Russian. The complete method used for the contrastive study of the idiomatic content of two languages is presented in the form of an algorithm that consists of a number of logical actions divided into stages, which makes it possible to conduct an exhaustive and systematic analysis.

The primary objective of the analysis part is to carry out a in-depth analysis of between Russian and Danish idioms observed with regard to equivalence aspects relations, in modern newspaper language. For this purpose, five sub-analyses were conducted focusing on the following aspects: 1) origin, 2) frequency, 3) expression and content, 4) denotative content and 5) connotative content. The analysis part is based on comprehensive empirical studies of modern idiom usage, including two data sets: (1) 60,296 hits on the Russian idioms and 39,350 hits on the Danish idioms (data for the frequency analysis and the examination of the modern forms of the idioms); and (2) approx. 7,000-8,000 examples of the realisation of the idioms in modern newspaper articles (data for qualitative analyses). All data stem from the period between 1 January 2000 and March-July 2008.

The contrastive analyses led to the conclusion that the most significant differences are observed in the frequency of the idioms, where 63 per cent of the idiom pairs differ, which means that only every third idiom in a one of languages is equivalent to an idiom of the another language. With regard to expression and content, the percentage is almost as high, with approx. 70 per cent of the idioms showing different types of deviations. Next are the differences in the denotative semantic content, where approx. 50 per cent of the Russian and approx. 30 per cent of the Danish idioms do not have an idiomatic equivalent of biblical origin in the other language, and where a large group of partially equivalent idioms were found (e.g. idioms with a monosemic/polysemic relation). In terms of style, there is profound parallelism between the idioms, with approx. 70 per cent of the Russian and approx. 60 per cent of the Danish idioms referring to written language, whereas the idioms in spoken language make up approx. 20 (Russian) and 30 per cent (Danish). The highest degree of equivalence between biblical idioms in Danish and Russian is found in relation to origin, where the distribution of idioms between biblical sources is almost identical.

The objective of the phraseographic part of the thesis, which is based on the results of the analysis part, is to conduct a critical study of a number of Danish and Russian idiom dictionaries with regard to their treatment of the idiomatic material, as well as to set up principles for a production-oriented bilingual idiom dictionary. Here, idiom data were compared with the results of the analysis of the empirical data, and a number of weaknesses in these descriptions were found and highlighted. All these aspects have been studied with a view to finding a way to rectify them or to make them methodologically more expedient in a bilingual production-oriented idiom dictionary, which has been chosen as a model for three test articles (full equivalence, partial equivalence and no equivalence). This part of the thesis resulted in a number of criteria for a scientific, corpus-based and production-oriented bilingual idiom dictionary.