Germanizmi u frazeologiji kajkavskoga govora grada Križevaca/Germanisms in the phraseology of the Kajkavian dialect of the town Križevci

Abstract

This article analyzes phrasemes with a German constituent in the dialect of the town of Križevci, collected during dialectology field research. Although Germanisms have been exhaustively investigated in standard and substandard Croatian, perhaps even better than other loanwords in Croatian, phraseological units with one or more German constituents have often been only sporadically and fragmentarily studied and described in articles dealing with language contact. Phrasemes with a German constituent, just like Germanisms themselves, comprise important lexical heritage that is increasingly disappearing due to generational differences or is becoming part of passive language knowledge, which is a compelling reason for more exhaustive investigations to gather and analyze this disappearing lexical stock before it is too late. This article analyzes 187 collected phrasemes with regard to their structural and semantic features. Because detailed dialectology field studies of local dialects of the Prigorje area have not been conducted until now, this article is a contribution to future comprehensive investigations of the entire phraseological corpus of that area, which would in effect show its own lexical and phraseological features in comparison to other Croatian dialects, and to standard Croatian as well.