engleski

The CONTAINER image schema and idiom variation

Croatian idioms describing difficult situations occur in two types of constructions in the Croatian National Corpus: locative and accusative. Acting in difficult circumstances is conceptualized as being in a container (e.g. biti u sosu (lit. be in a sauce.LOC)) or entering a container (e.g. upasti u dugove (lit. fall into debts.ACC)). In monolingual dictionaries of idioms the locative and accusative constructions are listed under separate entries, i.e. as individual expressions. We will show that they are not separate expressions but that in each case these are specific realizations of a single schematic idiom with a relatively variable structure. The aim of this paper is to show that the Croatian idioms describing difficult situations are systematically motivated and constrained by the CONTAINER image schema. More specifically, we will show that the idioms in question have a core element – the construction u + NP – which is invariable and serves as the basis for static (locative) and dynamic (accusative) construals.

idiom variation; corpus; the CONTAINER image schema; Croatian

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