Stereotype of the Mother in the Serbian Lanaguage

Abstract

The word mother in all cultures belongs to the small number of most elementary words such as sun, life, man, child, God, soul, earth, which make up the core of linguistic knowledge of people. The paper represents in a concise way research of the stereotypical notion of the mother, as it is manifested in the linguistic image of the world of young contemporary members of the Serbian culture. We examined, with a specially constructed for this occasion linguistic questionnaire, a sample of students (both genders, from four faculties of the University of Belgrade) to find out what the typical mother meant for them, what are her characteristics, what is her main line of personality, in what she finds the meaning of her life and similar. The results of the research of the semantic field of the lexeme mother show that in the reconstructed stereotypical notion a typical mother appears as the one who loves her children, is caring, tender, attentive, devoted, having no free time and therefore, for the sake of children and family, often ignores herself and her personal and professional needs.