Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Idioms that have the particle kao (as) in their composition are so-called similes: and they are universality in languages across the world, which makes them easy to understand also in the background. Similes are basically a comparison by similarity, which is conducted by conceptual metaphor COMPARISON IS SPATIAL CONFLICT.

We see the particle itself, as well as the articles comparandum and tertium comparationis as concepts based on different metaphors according to their grammatical affiliation. By combining at least two conceptual mechanisms (VERB IS NOUN; VERB IS ADJECTIVE; ADJECTIVE IS NOUN; ADVERB IS VERB and COMPARISON IS SPATIAL CONFLICT) similes appear as a complex but common way of expressing the picture of the world in the Bosnian language.

Guided by the cognitive-grammatical understanding of the grammatical profiles of words that fill the position of relata in similes, this presentation shows that superior metaphor in this type of idioms is GENERIC IS SPECIFIC. That is explained by the structural patterns of similes that show that the elements of more abstract grammatical profiles are represented by the topology of more concrete type of word.

Conceptual mapping in similes shows that it is still a complex cognitive mechanism that is implemented by the relationship at different levels of the grammatical-lexical profile of the components in similes.