The concept of ‘time’ in Spanish and Serbian phraseology

Abstract

The fact that Spanish and Serbian belong to different linguistic families(within the larger Indo-European family), and that their respective cultures also differ considerably, underlying this analysis of phraseological units (idioms, in particular) referring to the concept of “time”, a universal phenomenon presenting a variety of facets that can be analyzed from many different points of view. Our investigation is based on a corpus of some 350 idioms selected from different lexicographical sources (phraseological as well as general). We examine these idioms from a lexical-semantic perspective, always using a contrastive-analysis method, and we investigate the mechanism these two languages use when creating temporal idioms. We establish a general taxonomy of these expressions, classifying them in six groups according to their meaning: temporal relations, frequency, duration, temporal limits, rapidity, and temporal segments. Besides these groups with strictly temporal meaning, we distinguish one particular group consisted of temporal idioms displayed through the perspective of human life. At the beginning of our investigation we expected to encounter more differences when comparing their temporal idioms due to typological differences between the languages we examined. However, our study demonstrated that partial equivalents are predominant, in that they show many common features: temporal fixed expressions in either language do not present high level of idiomaticity (most of them are adverbial idioms) and they oft en use lexemes with temporal meaning. Additionally, it also demonstrated that both languages use lexemes from the same semantic fields (names of fruits, names of animals) but to express different temporal relations. The differences increase when comparing substantive, adjectival and verbal idioms, because they reveal a higher level of idiomaticity.