PHRASEOLOGICAL MODIFICATIONS IN SVETISLAV BASARA’S COLUMNS

Abstract

The use of phraseology by the Serbian writer and columnist Svetislav Basara is presented in this paper through analysis of examples of phraseological modifications in Basara’s columns from two different sources, from the newspaper Danas and the newspaper Kurir. The analysis of phraseological modifications reveals the author’s specific approach to language and the linguistic picture of the world and therefore can be used as onе of the possible approaches to studying his linguistic personality. The goal of the research was to prove that the analysis of phraseological modifications can be one of the approaches in the study of the author’s linguistic personality and to show that the theory of linguistic personality can be applied not only in the study of literary texts but also in journalistic discourse. Phraseological modifications were analyzed using a lexical-semantic and pragmatic approach, and classified based on the type of transformation of phraseological expressions. The analysis of modified phraseologisms extracted from Basara’s columns showed that the lexical plan of phraseologism is the most susceptible to changes, and is realized as contamination, substitution, interpolation and reduction. Although less often, changes may also involve the plan of grammatical structure. The semantic level of the phraseology is also subject to changes, mainly as an intensification or concretization of the basic meaning of the phraseologism. The pragmatic approach of the analysis reveals the motivational level of the linguistic personality of the author and the pragmatic goals of using phraseological modifications in the columns. The research results showed that the author uses the same types of phraseological modifications with the same pragmatic goals in the columns from both sources, which leads to the conclusion that there were no changes at the motivational level of his linguistic personality.