A type of minimal phraseological units characteristic of Slovene
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.45.1.159-172Keywords:
A type of minimal phraseological units characteristic of SloveneAbstract
The Slovene language abounds with phraseological units with the structure verb and clitics (clitic word forms) jo, ga, jih, such as ucvreti jo 'to run away', lomiti ga 'to do foolish things, to make mistakes'. The linguistic treatment of this group is interesting, since the question whether jo, ga, jih are clitics of a personal pronoun or free verb morphemes raises the problem of the demarcation line between the (idiomatic) word and (phraseological) word combination. As far as phraseology is concerned, the above-men tioned group is interesting because it represents one of the structures of minimal phraseological units 1 which are, doubtlessly, most frequent in Slovene second only to phraseological prepositional phrases. For the Slovene phraseology, this group is impor tant, since it is a large one, and as examples in the Corpus of Slovene Texts called FIDA2 show, (still) a productive one. Examples of phraseological units of the same type which are constantly formed anew lead us to believe that we are faced with a model formation and they are indicative of the processes of 'modelization'. A quick look at the phraseology of other Slavonic languages reveals that such phraseological units exist only exceptionally if they are not absent altogether. As far as I know, the phraseological units of this type exist only in Croatian and Serbian (in a very limited number of cases, such asjebi ga). In Pleteršnik's Slovene-German Dictionary (1894: 828) a note is included under the entry I. on (ona, ono).