Adinaton kao mehanizam izražavanja apsolutne nemogućnosti i negacije u frazemikonu govora Rožaja (‘ništa’ kao semantički podtip)
Adynaton as a Mechanism for Expressing Absolute Impossibility and Negation in the Phraseology of the Rožaj Dialect (“nothing” as a semantic subtype)

Summary/Abstract: This paper will present an analysis of adinatophrases from the Rožaje speech from the semantic field of the negative quantifier ‘nothing’. Adinaton is a specific mechanism in semantic phraseology, defined differently in the literature, and most often with reference to only one of its meanings – ‘never’. This figure is defined as a subtype of hyperbole, sometimes also periphrasis, it is rarely singled out in the literature, and its semantic scope is even more rarely indicated. Adinaton can be a periphrastic construction, but periphrastic constructions are not strictly adinato, and therefore we consider it important to single out adinaton as a separate stylistic figure, and also as an efficient mechanism of phraseological transposition. Based on the material consisting of 18 idioms from the Rožaje speech collected using the elicitation method during 2023, 2024 and 2025, we will analyze the motivational structure of adinaton, as a hyperbolic evaluation implying the absolute absence of something. The research corpus consists of selected idioms from the local dialect (although the corpus is more extensive, due to the limitations of the scope of the work, only representative ones will be analyzed here). The aim of the research in this paper is to analyze adinaton as a mechanism of phraseologization in the semantic field of ‘nothing’, in order to determine the potential of adinaton in idioms and the motivational foundations on which it rests, and to draw conclusions about the justification for distinguishing adinaton as an independent stylistic figure. The starting point is the hypothesis that adinaton is an independent and very productive mechanism of semantic transposition in phraseology, which distinguishes it as a separate stylistic figure, which cannot be reduced to a type of hyperbole or periphrasis, and that idioms of the adinaton type in the speech of Rožaje with the meaning of ‘nothing’ are most often based on the semantics of impossibility.

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