engleski

Idiom variation and grammaticalization : a case study

This paper deals with similes following the (as) + adjective + as + NP pattern (e.g. (as) white as snow) and cognate adjectival forms (snow-white) in English, Swedish and Croatian. Previous studies (Fink Arsovski 2002 ; Omazić 2002) and dictionaries (e.g. Cowie, Mackin and McCaig 1985 ; Svenskt språkbruk 2003 ; Fink Arsovski et al. 2006) show that similes and adjectival forms have similar meanings: they typically refer to objects and humans (their physical properties and character). However, corpus research has shown that adjectival forms may occur with a different set of nouns and have different meanings (Moon 2008 ; Novoselec and Parizoska 2012). The aim is to show that differences in structure between similes and adjectival forms reflect differences in meaning. More specifically, we will show that the changes which adjectival forms undergo are the result of their grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott 2003 ; Heine and Kuteva 2004 ; Brinton and Traugott 2005). We conducted a study of 454 similes in the British National Corpus, the Swedish PAROLE corpus and the Croatian National Corpus, looking for items which have cognate adjectival forms. The results show that adjectival forms are used with a wider range of nouns and have a different or wider range of meaning, and they typically occur in prenominal position, which is associated with permanent and characteristic qualities (Radden and Dirven 2007 ; Langacker 2008). This indicates that idiom variation is not only a structural or a semantic phenomenon, but may be viewed as a category which includes both structure and meaning.

poredbeni frazemi; varijantnost; pridjevne složenice; gramatikalizacija

nije evidentirano