Upitni frazemi Donjega Međimurja (govor Svete Marije)
Interrogative Idioms of Lower Međimurje Dialect (The Local Dialect of St. Mary)

Summary/Abstract: This study explores interrogative idioms, extracted from the rich phraseological corpus of the local dialect of the St. Mary’s settlement located in the Lower Međimurje region. This analysis shows that the features of interrogative idioms are largely similar to those in other Croatian dialectal phraseology and phraseology of the Croatian standard language. The proper interrogative idioms, with questionability as the only and permanent feature, are confirmed. Also, this paper demonstrates that different meanings can be expressed with the proper interrogative idioms, among which the speaker’s utterance of reproach to the interlocutor prevails. Finally, this analysis confirms that there are idioms among the interrogative idioms of St. Mary’s speech containing two and more sentences (no such idiom has been noted so far in Croatian phraseology). In idioms containing two sentences, both sentences are interrogative or (more often) just one of them is. When only one sentence is interrogative, it is usually at the beginning. There can be one speaker or two of them telling idioms with two and more sentences. Most of these idioms contain rhymes and unexpected lexical connections that give the idioms a humorous tone. While there are some mockery idioms based on personal names among the interrogative idioms of St. Mary’s speech, no such idiom has been noted in Croatian phraseology so far. This research has shown that specificities can be found in local speech that enrich the overall Croatian (dialectal) phraseology. Therefore, this analysis is an invitation to further research and study of phraseological treasure that has been unexplored up to this point.

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