engleski

Variation of Croatian verbal idioms with the locative u (‘in’) phrase

The notion that idioms are invariable expressions has been relativized, especially more recently in light of strong empirical evidence from corpus-based research. It has been shown that idioms may occur in two or more lexical and/or syntactic forms (e.g. Moon 1998 ; Cignoni, Coffey and Moon 1999). Moreover, it has been shown that this variation is systematic (Langlotz 2006). For example, studies of Croatian idioms (Parizoska 2009 ; Parizoska and Novoselec 2010) have shown that in expressions containing a verb and the locative u (‘in’) phrase, being in a state is conceptualized as being located in a place which resembles a container (e.g. biti u prvom planu lit. be in the foreground ‘receive a lot of attention’), while getting into a state is construed as self-motion and/or caused motion of an entity along a path towards a location (doći u prvi plan lit. come to the foreground ; gurnuti u prvi plan lit. push someone into the foreground). This is expressed by the locative and accusative construction respectively and the use of the copular verb be vs. motion verbs and force-dynamic verbs. However, data from the Croatian National Corpus seem to challenge this systematicity, showing that spatial schemas alone are not detailed enough to account for the variation of verbal idioms containing the locative u phrase. Firstly, some of these idioms do not occur as dynamic construals (e.g. biti u krivu ‘be wrong’). Secondly, in expressions which occur as accusative constructions there seem to be certain constraints on verb variation. For example, some idioms allow motion verbs as well as force-dynamic verbs, whereas in other expressions verb variation is restricted only to motion verbs (e.g. doći ‘come’ and dovesti ‘bring’). This begs the question: what is the nature of the constraints restricting the occurrence of the dynamic variant and verb variation? The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which Croatian verbal idioms with the locative u phrase may vary. More specifically, we will show that they exhibit various degrees of variability with regard to the type of construal (static or dynamic) and type of verb. We conducted a study of 36 idioms in the Croatian National Corpus. The results show that there is a scale of variability: from items that occur only as the static variant with biti ‘be’ (e.g. biti u pravu ‘be right’), to those that occur as both locative and accusative constructions (e.g. biti u dobrim rukama ‘be in good hands’), to items which may also occur as genitive constructions with iz ‘out of’’ (e.g. biti u dugovima ‘be in debt’). The results also show that variation is not only dependent on the underlying conceptual motivation (the spatial schema), but it also seems to be constrained on the local level, i.e. it is tied to the constructional meaning of a particular expression. This is in line with the view of idioms as expressions whose constructional meaning is more than the sum of its parts (e.g. Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor 1998 ; Langacker 2008), thus implying that the syntactic and semantic properties of an idiom must be associated with the given construction.

idioms; variation; locative; Croatian; the Croatian National Corpus

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