Contrastive Croatian-Italian phraseology with the somatism eye: cultural implications

Abstract

The paper deals with the Croatian and Italian idiomatic phrases containing the somatism eye. The idioms are taken out from the monolingual Croatian and Italian dictionaries and phraseological dictionaries. The research is based on the contrastive analysis of the Croatian and Italian idioms. The aim of the analysis is to group the idioms according to their common semantic features and then, inside the semantic groupings, find the differences in the lexis expressing these common ideas, and thereafter see if these differences in the idiomatic language implicate also some cultural differences. The idiomatic phrases which are entirely equivalent in the two languages will be given less attention in the analysis. The results of the analysis show that there are many common features but also some contrastive peculiarities between Croatian and Italian phraseology, such as a more frequent tendency towards a subtle representation in the Italian idiomatic language, and a more frequent tendency towards a more explicit representation in the Croatian idiomatic language.

Keywords

• contrastive phraseology
• equivalence
• Croatian language
• Italian language