Semantic and Structural Review of Oikonyms in the Region of Romanija Mountain

Abstract

Relying on the theory of conceptual metaphor, this paper contrastively analyses lexemes from the lexical field family in English (family, father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother) and porodica in Serbian (porodica, otac, majka, sin, kći, sestra, brat). The aim of the paper is to establish similarities and differences between metaphorical meanings of these lexemes and, on the basis of that, to determine the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural similarities and differences between these two languages. The analysis is based on the material excerpted from monolingual dictionaries of English and Serbian. Numerous similarities have been established between the lexemes from this lexical field, which is probably a consequence of the common European cultural space and the Christian foundation upon which it rests.