Basic emotions in Croatian phraseology

• Main Authors: Ermina Ramadanović, Barbara Kovačević
• Format: Article
• Language: Croatian
• Published: Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje 2016-01-01
• Series: Rasprave: Časopis Instituta za Hrvatski Jezik i Jezikoslovlje
• Subjects: basic emotions; phraseology; somatic idioms; Croatian language
• Online Access: http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/262026
• ISSN: 1331-6745; 1849-0379

Emotions are psychological experiences which, in contrast to the real perception, expressing man’s relationship with the world around him or subjective state usually accompanied by physiological changes that encourages people to react. That emotions are important for the human race shows and centuries dealing with the psychological phenomenon (Darwin, 1872), which resulted in a variety of theories to this day have not agreed on a list of basic emotions. The event emotion always been associated with a physical reaction which is reflected in the non-verbal communication and that is the basis for the emergence of a large number of phrases. In this study, on the basis of the Croatian corpus of idioms (with special reference to Croatian somatic idioms), we will explore the emotions that occur in Croatian phraseology, i.e., which expressions have emotional motivation. To classify the phrases to express human emotions we started from the Ekman model (1970) which contains six basic, innate and universal human emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust). The phraseological analysis will be on the one hand based on idioms in which the emotion is a component of idiom (ljut (bijesan) kao ris (pas), srce je stalo komu <od straha>) and on the other hand on the idioms from which we read the emotions on their semantic aspect (srce je sišlo (silazi) u pete komu, srce se steže (steglo, stislo) komu).