While speakers are involved in a daily conversation, they frequently use idioms in order to transfer their desired concepts in an implicit and indirect way. Idioms are frozen structures that sometimes their meanings are not transparent and their constituents cannot predict their meaning obviously. Hence speakers need to have a cultural background and personal experience to understand them. In fact, idioms are among structures that speakers try to learn and use throughout their lifelong. In this article, we definitely focus on the idioms having at least one animal name inside. These names are used in Kurdish language to convey specific concepts figuratively. In this article we try to show how frequently these lexical terms are used and which concepts they convey in Kurdish. As far as frequency is concerned, it was seen that some of these names are widely used in the rigid structure of idioms. It should be noted that these concepts symbolized by animals are mostly culture-dependent. That is, an animal standing for a peculiar concept in Kurdish, may not stand for the same concept in another language. As it can be figured out, in this article the semantic components of idioms are focalized.

Keywords