engleski

Phraseological Derivation in Croatian: Nominalization of Verbal Idioms

Phraseological derivation, i.e. the formation of new idioms from existing ones, is common in Slavic languages. For example, verbal idioms undergo nominalization in Polish (Bąba 2003), Russian (Ermakova 2008) and Croatian (Parizoska 2010): lać wodę na młyn → woda na młyn water-NOM on mill-ACC ‘an advantage’ ; забрасывать грязью → забрасывание грязью throwing-NOM dirt-INSTR ‘damage to someone’s reputation’ ; loviti u mutnom → lovac u mutnom hunter-NOM in murky-LOC ‘a person who takes an advantage from a difficult situation’. However, in Croatian phraseological derivation has not been not the central focus of studies of idioms and studies that have been carried out in other Slavic languages are based on hand-collected data. Furthermore, no account has been given of the mechanisms involved in this process. Data from the hrWaC corpus show that verbal idioms in Croatian undergo patterns of nominalization similar to those found in other Slavic languages. For example, nominal expressions derived from idioms that are caused-motion and self-motion constructions (baciti rukavicu u lice throw glove-ACC in face-ACC ‘to challenge’) describe situations and/or participants: bacanje rukavice u lice (throwing glove-GEN in face-ACC) ; bacač rukavice u lice (thrower glove-GEN in face-ACC). However, there seems to be a difference in the occurrence of specific patterns. Nouns ending in –nje seem to be the predominant type, whereas agentive nouns occur rarely. So the question is: what is the nature of the mechanisms underlying nominalization of verbal idioms? The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which Croatian verbal idioms can be nominalized. More specifically, we will show that there are some constraints regarding the type of reification. We conducted a study of 160 idioms that are caused-motion and self-motion constructions in the hrWaC corpus (1.9 billion tokens). The results show that 73% of the derived constructions contain a deverbal noun which describes a steady situation (padanje ‘falling’) and 29% contain a noun that describes an episodic situation (pad ‘a fall’). In 13% of the cases the noun phrase profiles the theme (rukavica u lice glove-NOM in face-ACC ‘a challenge’). Agentive nouns occur in 5% of the cases. Overall, the results show that the most common patterns of nominalization are those in which the original relational concept is invoked: the noun describes a situation or profiles the theme, where motion is encoded in the preposition and the accusative case. The reason why the profile rarely shifts to the agent may be that the relative permanence of the agentive noun is incompatible with the nature of (verbal) idioms: we use idioms to refer to the characteristics of specific situations, rather than to assign permanent properties. Studies of other Slavic and non-Slavic languages should be undertaken to see what mechanisms of nominalization of verbal idioms are at work and how they affect an idiom’s conceptual core (Langlotz 2006), which reflects the mappings that are the basis of idiomatic meaning.

phraseological derivation; verbal idioms; nominalization; Croatian; corpus

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