´Government´and ´State´: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

The proposed subject matter of research will be the growth of a specific intellectual vocabulary referring to government and state as it appears in Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian newspapers and other political publications in the period of 1840 - 1870 in order to show how these language communities were being integrated into the European political discourse as it was at that time. On the basis of lexical items gathered from the sources it will be observed how the relevant notions are expressed by loan-words, loan translations and semantic innovations in the traditional vocabulary. Special attention shall be paid to characteristic contexts and their implications for the way in which things are seen. The history of vocabulary will thus be correlated to the history of ideas. Broader connexions will appear as well as specific differences. The history of words will be systematized according to semantic fields. They will be put into the frame of the prevailing currents of thought in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848 and under the impact of their lasting consequences which have laid the foundations of modern times in that part of Europe. The contacts with German and Hungarian as well as with Czech and Russian will be taken into full account.