engleski

Idiomatic expressions based on metonymies of the type subevent-for the-whole-event in English and Croatian

The theoretical part of the paper deals with different viewpoints on idioms, metonymies and metaphors. The second part is a contrastive analysis of English idiomatic expressions based on metonymies of the type SUBEVENT-FOR-THE-EVENT and their Croatian correspondents. The corpus of is divided into 3 main groups depending on which stage of the event they represent – the beginning, the middle or the final stage. The groups are further divided into subgroups with the objective of determining the way that these expressions are translated into Croatian. In other words, the subgroups were formed according to the level of lexical, structural and semantic correspondence between English expressions and their Croatian counterparts. Many idiomatic expressions are motivated by metonymy (and/or metaphor). It is a conceptual device that connects two ideas by means of association ; i.e. uses one word for another that it implies. It is the metonymy in the root of many idioms that may cause problems with the comprehension of the expressions, and thus, gives rise to difficulties in the transfer from one language to the other, but generally there is overlap between languages in this respect. Native speakers of both English and Croatian mostly use the beginning stage of an event to portray the whole event. The smallest number of examples is in the group where a middle subevent stands for the event. It is also apparent that only a marginal number of idioms with underlying metonymies where a subevent denotes the event completely match their Croatian counterparts in structural and lexical respect, while the majority of idioms are bound to be the source of difficulties for Croatian learners of English.

metonymy; metaphor; idiom; contrastive analysis; equivalence

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