GERMAN AND CROATIAN PHRASEMES AS EXPRESSIONS OF SPACE

Abstract

This paper investigates phrasemes used for expressing space in the German and Croatian languages. Dimensions of space, which are determined according to grammatical, semantic and spatio-linguistic investigations, are considered. The phrasemes were collected from general and phraseological dictionaries in each language. Morphosyntactic and semantic classifications were used in the analysis.
The analysis shows the following spatial dimensions, which can be expressed with phrasemes in both languages: “width”, “everywhere”, “distance”, “vicinity” and “location”. The “width” dimension can be represented with idiomatic adverbial phrasemes containing the constituents the open, sky and world. In the “everywhere” dimension, all directions and distances are signalled with the constituents corner, side, pace, way, world, up – down, from – in, from – to, left and right. The constituents range, mounts and the end of the world are used to refer to large distances within the “distance” dimension, while nose, heel and pace belong to the “vicinity” dimension. The last dimension, “location“, includes home, shelter and also geographical sites and distinguishes between positive and negative values.