WIND INSTRUMENTS IN SERBIAN PHRASEOLOGY

Abstract

Musical instruments are integral to our folklore and tradition, so much so that some even entered the phraseology of the Serbian language, shaping the image of the world expressed by it. The paper is aimed at examining idioms containing wind instruments as their component to determine what kind of linguistic image they depict. Examination of such material in contemporary Serbian language necessitated that its corpus be borrowed from The Phraseological Dictionary of the Serbian Language by Đorđe Otašević (2012), both due to its year of publication, and the author's intentions to examine the contemporary standard language. Reviewing the Dictionary, it was established that the following wind instruments occur as phraseological components: bagpipes, diple (type of bagpipe), duduk (double-reed woodwind instrument), the horn, svirala (pipe or flute), gourd and the fanfare. The semantic analysis of the idioms that contain the wind instruments mentioned above has established that the generation of the phraseological meaning results in a complete or partial desemanticization. In cases of complete desemanticization, the process of generating sound, i.e. playing these instruments, is transferred to the domain of human speech, thinking and actions. The process of partial desemanticization largely occurs in idioms with a comparative structure which are used to denote human traits, states or behaviors. In both cases, phraseologisms with negative meanings dominate. This may indicate that some of the functions of these wind instruments in our past have been negatively evaluated in the collective conscious from an ethical point of view, which indicates the need for new research.