Stereotypes in Czech phraseology. Nations and ethnic groups

Abstract

The starting point for this study is that (the majority of) conventional figurative units (CFUs) are conceptual in nature and that they somehow record and preserve the knowledge and even worldview of diverse cultures. The aim of this paper is to take a first step towards answering the question whether it is true not only that phraseology preserves the way a given culture understands the world (or understood it in the past), but if it works the other way round, i.e. if people using/knowing CFUs involving stereotypes – in this case, Czech idioms and collocations regarding nations and ethnic groups – tend to extend these stereotypes and attitudes beyond the linguistic sphere.

For this purpose a survey questionnaire was created, by means of which the stereotypes underlying a varied sample of 13 Czech CFUs were related to the prejudices of the respondents.