Abstract:
Symbolic meaning is broadly defined as cultural reference of lexemes that goes beyond pure semantic meaning. In this sense, semantic components of phraseologisms, or whole phraseologisms that possess such symbolic meaning are cultural, as well as semantic, signs in language. Their semantic reference is traced archetypically to the cultural facts that reflect their symbolism and is revealed through the cultural meaning of the linguistic signs in them. Such symbolic meaning can be found in Bulgarian phraseologisms that contain as components the lexemes for bread, mother, water, among others. As well as being semantic signs in Bulgarian language, they also reflect certain cultural reference that is contained not in language, but in the cultural realia to which they belong as archetypes. This inference about the broad cultural reference of the above semantic components in Bulgarian phraseologisms finds further confirmation in the fact that as linguistic signs, they indeed are archetypical for Bulgarian culture. Apart from that, they have also been recurrently found to elicit their archetypical reference as signs on their own, beyond phrаsemes, and their symbolism has been proven by a number of cultural facts established in Bulgarian language. Adversely, no semantic components, or phraseologisms as a whole, can be defined as symbols in language, as words, unless their symbolic meaning is confirmed by the archetypal world of cultural facts about language.
