Phraseological units with the component heart in Croatian and Swedish – cultural models and motivation

Novoselec, Zvonimir. (2019). Phraseological units with the component heart in Croatian and Swedish – cultural models and motivation. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Linguistics.
(PDS Lingvistika) [mentor Antunović, Goranka and Žic Fuchs, Milena].

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Abstract

Phraseological units which have a body part as a part of their structure are very common in languages. This fact serves as one form of proof that we conceptualize ourselves anthropocentrically. It is the link between language, humans, and the world around us that we want to show when we strive to determine the conceptual motivation of one specific type of phraseological unit – idioms with the component heart – in Croatian and Swedish (Cro. srce; Swe. hjärta), following the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The aim of this study is to show that conceptualizations of the heart in both languages are not arbitrary, but rather motivated by a small number of cultural models that are elaborated by conceptual metaphors, many of which are based on conceptual metonymies. The other aim is to systematically organize terminology in Croatian when it comes to phraseology. From phraseological, monolingual, and bilingual dictionaries and partly from the Croatian web-corpus HrWac and the Swedish corpus Korp, we excerpted 133 idioms in Croatian and 73 idioms in Swedish and looked at their usage in the Croatian web-corpus Hrvatski nacionalni korpus and the Swedish corpus Korp. The examples have been analyzed in terms of their meaning and conceptual motivation, which have proved to go hand in hand, showing that three cultural models are profiled in the conceptualizations.

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