Black and White World in the Latest Political Discourse of Bosnian and German Language

Abstract

The analysis of idioms with a component of black and/or white colours carried out in recent political discourse of Bosnian and German language showed a great structural and semantic congruence, and also indicated the influence of social factors on the formation of new collocations in the language. Special attention was dedicated to the black and white colour symbolism. Contrastive analysis, whose aim was to determine how the idioms of Bosnian language matched with their translation equivalents, revealed that the meanings and contexts in which idioms with components of black and/ or white colour appear largely coincide. The reason for this might be the presence of many similarities in cultural terms, as well as the geographic proximity of the two countries. Black and white colour, as elements of idioms, in both languages have similar connotations, as well as prototypes with which they usually connect (collar, gloves, books, sheet). Idioms, in which black colour was mostly engaged indicated something rather negative; white colour idioms indicated something positive or have served as a contrast to everything negative in the society , usually something that is very difficult to prove. In most examples, the colour symbolism was the one who influenced the importance of idioms (white / brown bread, black face, white book, Crime in white gloves, white collar crime, white Schengen, Schengen black, white vapor, dark days). Few examples were based on the visual aspect of the symbolism where colour was not crucial to the meaning of the idiom (black Marica, green mine). Moreover, the analysis has identified examples that do not have their equivalents in other language (put aside white money for black days), as well as those in which literal translation was highly appreaciated as they are unique and appears only in one language (white bread). The conclusions reached are fully valid only for the kind of text types included in the corpus. The results would have been more different, if larger corpus had been used.