Periferija i margina – značenja i konteksti

The article explores semantics and the use of two lexemes: periphery and margin. Both lexemes in dictionaries are explicitly or implicitly defined in opposition to the center and denote the surface, the area, the space that is away from it, which is ‘outside’. The first part analyzes their definitions in Croatian language dictionaries, primary and secondary meanings and similarities and differences in meanings. The second part covers the study of contexts in which they have been recorded and the correspondence of lexical meaning with a specified situation. The analyzed lexemes have similar range of meaning, so the article also questions their possible substitutability. Both lexemes are of foreign origin and in the original languages they refer to neutral categories, they have a denotative meaning. However, in the Croatian language, they also have a secondary, marked meaning, therefore the research takes into account (in)direct evaluation that indicates how these lexemes work in the mind of language user. The searching covers the problem of their marking and tries to answer the question whether they are always stigmatized as a negative sign of concepts that indicate what Croatian phrases can suggest (for example to be on / at the periphery of something, to be on the margins) or they can also be relied to positive features and affirm certain phenomena. The analysis is carried out on examples from the Croatian Language Corpus and the Croatian National Corpus, which allowed an overview of different types of discourses and texts.