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This paper discusses the problems of lexicographical representation of Modern Greek constructional phrasemes – productive phraseological patterns with one or more variable components (slots). The analysis of Modern Greek general and phraseological dictionaries has shown that, in Modern Greek lexicography, there is no unified approach towards the description of this type of phraseologisms. One of the significant problems associated with lexicographical treatment of Modern Greek constructional phrasemes is that some of them are registered in dictionaries as fully fixed expressions with their slot(s) filled with a specific lexeme or a specific proposition, without any indication that these expressions possess a variable component. Such lexicographical representation of productive phraseological patterns does not reflect the real linguistic usage and does not allow the reader of the dictionary to understand that the expressions described in the dictionary as fully fixed show considerable variation and possess one or two slots that can be filled with a wide range of words or word combinations. The corpus analysis of the constructional phraseme Ούτε να Ρ (literally, ‘neither if’), which is registered in Modern Greek dictionaries in five different, all fully lexically specified forms, has shown that the specific realizations of this productive phraseological pattern included in the dictionaries either have relatively low frequency of occurrence in the corpus, or are not encountered in the corpus at all. Other realizations of this phraseological pattern account for over 92 % of all the cases of its use in the corpus, but the common pattern behind them can hardly be identified with the help of the existing lexicographical descriptions, as it is registered in the dictionaries under the lemmas of five different lexemes that do not form part of its fixed component. Based on the findings of this study, the paper raises the issue of developing a new approach towards the description of productive phraseological patterns that currently pose a significant challenge for adequate lexicographical representation.

The paper presents the results of the corpus and lexicographical analysis of two Modern Greek constructional phrasemes (a class of phraseologisms distinguished by A. N. Baranov and D. O. Dobrovol’skij) with antonymous verbs in their fixed part — Χ τον ανεβάζει, Χ / Y τον κατεβά- ζει and Χ μπαίνει, Χ βγαίνει. It is noted that though these constructional phrasemes have different meanings and dissimilar functions in the sentence there is structural and semantic similarity between them. The two phrasemes represent a rhyming two-part structure, whose main lexical “anchors” are antonymous locative verbs expressing a counter-directional movement of a subject or an object in space. It is shown that the pairs of the antonymous verbs become desemanticized and the relation of antonymy between them becomes lost as they form the fixed part of the constructional phrasemes. It is emphasized that at the same time the original locative meaning of the verbs adds it imagery to the semantic content of these phrasemes, becoming the basis of their inner form, and determines some part of their meaning — the meaning of multitude of repeating situations. The paper also takes into consideration some idiomatical constructions of other languages that have similar meanings to those of the Greek constructional phrasemes. It is demonstrated that many of these constructions are also formed by means of locative antonyms, which provides evidence to suggest that this type of inner form is frequent among phraseologisms denoting multitude of repeating situations.