The semantic motivation of plant-related idiomatic expressions in English and Serbian

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to investigate the semantic motivation of a set of English and Serbian plant-related idiomatic expressions, to ascertain the cognitive mechanisms that motivate their semantic structure and, ultimately, to contrast them, using the cognitive semantic view of idioms. Our analysis shows that in both languages the conceptual metaphors based on the source domain of plants play a very important role in the semantics of the analysed idiomatic expressions, accompanied by the conventional knowledge, the conceptual metonymy and image schemas. The concluding part discusses the observed similarities in the cognitive mechanisms which motivate the semantics of the analysed expressions, but also reflects upon certain differences between the two languages in terms of the idiomatic expression constituents.