TEMPORAL ADVERBS IN IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS OF GERMAN AND ROMANIAN: SEMANTIC, PRAGMATIC, AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
TEMPORAL ADVERBS IN IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS OF GERMAN AND ROMANIAN: SEMANTIC, PRAGMATIC, AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the semantic and cultural functions of temporal adverbs in German and Romanian idiomatic expressions. The analysis shows that adverbs such as heute, morgen, immer and astăzi, mâine, mereu go beyond indicating time and act as semantic intensifiers, narrative condensers, and cultural markers. While German idioms tend to reflect a linear and order-oriented concept of time, Romanian idioms reveal a more flexible, cyclical and context-dependent temporal worldview. Overall, the study demonstrates that temporal adverbs play a crucial role in shaping idiomatic meaning and provide insight into the culturally embedded conceptualizations of time in German and Romanian.Furthermore, the study highlights the role of temporal adverbs as narrative mechanisms that construct notions of repetition, sudden change, and cyclical recurrence. Temporal negation (nie, niciodată) is shown to possess significant rhetorical force, expanding the conceptual horizon of human possibility and moral agency. Overall, the findings illustrate that temporal adverbs in idiomatic expressions operate as culturally encoded meaning generators that model perceptions of order, change, expectation, and agency. Their contrastive analysis provides valuable insights into the cultural conceptualizations of time that shape the German and Romanian linguistic worlds.

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