"Reciprocal Correspondence in Phraseology. Spanish-Serbian contrastive analysis"

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse idiomatic expressions which contain the lexeme eye in Spanish and Serbian. We will primarily focus on the idioms
marked by absolute symmetry in form and meaning, i.e. those commonly referred to as absolute translation equivalents. Firstly, we will introduce the focal point of our cross-linguistic analysis. Then we will present various degrees of equivalency across the target phraseological units, giving priority to absolute or total correspondence/equivalency. The central part of our study will be dedicated to a contrastive idiomatic comparison of Spanish and Serbian, two genetically related but distant languages. More precisely, we will examine formally corresponding idioms that express the same concepts, i.e. those that share a common semantic meaning, morphosyntactic and lexical structure, as well as pragmatic characteristics. Our data indicate that different actions, abstract phenomena and situations have been first perceived and, subsequently, lexicalized by means of these almost identical linguistic expressions. The method applied can be defined as contrastive semantic analysis whereas our corpus was excerpted from numerous Spanish and Serbian lexicographic (Rečnik Matice srpske 2007; Rečnik Matice srpske vol. 1-6 1967-1976; RAE Diccionario de la Lengua Española 2001) or phraseological resources
(Matešić 1982; Seco de Arpe 2005; Varela, Kubarth 1996).