engleski

A corpus-based study of idioms of comparison and their variants in English, Swedish and Croatian

In English and Swedish idioms of comparison with the structure (as) + adjective + as + NP occur as compounds (e.g. crystal clear, ice cold, snow-white ; nattsvart, iskall, stenhård). In Croatian such compounds occur rarely, but there are examples of adverb + adjective collocations which may be based on idioms of comparison (e.g. ledeno hladan ‘ice cold’). The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between the as...as constructions and compounds in English, Swedish and Croatian, using electronic corpora – the British National Corpus, Parole and the Croatian National Corpus. The aim is to show that the as...as constructions and compounds should be treated as variants of a single idiomatic configuration with different levels of conventionality and grammaticalization. More specifically, we argue that compounds express an epistemically closer relationship with the nominal element, i.e that they are grammaticalized. Our results show that the semantic and syntactic properties of compounds in all three languages are similar: they are used with a wider set of nouns than the as…as constructions and they prototypically occupy the prenominal position. This indicates that similar mechanisms underlie the process of the creation of compounds, i.e. compounds are grammaticalized. Our results raise several points of discussion: 1) the conventionality of compounds and their status as idiomatic expressions ; 2) the differences between English, Swedish and Croatian with regard to variation of idioms of comparison (Croatian does not form compounds based on idioms of comparison as easily as English and Swedish) ; and 3) the forms which are listed in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries as standard forms.

idioms of comparison; variation; compounds; corpus; English; Croatian; Swedish

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