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Idiom
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Number
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WIKIMAG n. 8 - Luglio 2013
Idiom
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- Togli il segno di spunta per disattivarla
An idiom (Latin:
idioma, "special property",
f.
Greek: ἰδίωμα – idiōma,
"special feature, special phrasing", f.
Greek: ἴδιος – idios,
"one’s own") is a combination of words that has a
figurative
meaning, due to its common usage. An idiom's figurative meaning is
separate from the
literal meaning or
definition of the words of which it is made.[1]
Idioms are numerous and they occur frequently in all languages. There
are estimated to be at least 25,000 idiomatic expressions in the
English language.[2]
Compositionality
In
linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be
figures of speech contradicting the
principle of compositionality.[3]
This principle states that the meaning of a whole should be constructed
from the meanings of the parts that make up the whole. In other words,
one should be in a position to understand the whole if one understands
the meanings of each of the parts that makes up the whole. The following
example is widely employed to illustrate the point:
-
- Fred kicked the bucket.
Understood compositionally, Fred has literally kicked an actual,
physical bucket. The much more likely idiomatic reading, however, is
non-compositional: Fred is understood to have died. Arriving at the
idiomatic reading from the literal reading is unlikely for most
speakers. What this means is that the idiomatic reading is, rather,
stored as a single
lexical item that is now largely independent of the literal reading.
In
phraseology, idioms are defined as a sub-type of
phraseme, the meaning of which is not the regular sum of the
meanings of its component parts.[4]
John Saeed defines an idiom as
collocated words that became affixed to each other until
metamorphosing into a
fossilised term.[5]
This collocation of words redefines each component word in the
word-group and becomes an idiomatic expression. Idioms
usually do not translate well; in some cases, when an idiom is
translated directly word-for-word into another language, either its
meaning is changed or it is meaningless.
When two or three words are often used together in a particular
sequence, the words are said to be irreversible binomials, or
Siamese twins. Usage will prevent the words from being displaced or
rearranged. For example, a person may be left "high and dry" but never
"dry and high". This idiom in turn means that the person is left in
their former condition rather than being assisted so that their
condition improves. Not all Siamese twins are idioms, however. "Reading,
writing, and arithmetic" is a frozen trinomial[clarification
needed], but it is usually taken literally.
Translating idioms
Literal translation (word-by-word) of opaque idioms will not convey
the same meaning in other languages. Idioms from other languages that
are analogous to kick the bucket in English are listed next:
-
- Bulgarian: da ritnesh kambanata (да ритнеш
камбаната) 'to kick the bell'
- Danish: at stille træskoene 'to take off the
clogs',
- Dutch: het loodje leggen 'to lay the piece of
lead' or de pijp aan Maarten geven 'to give the pipe to
Maarten',
- Finnish: potkaista tyhjää 'to kick the void',
- French: manger des pissenlits par la racine
'to eat dandelions by the root',
- German: den Löffel abgeben 'to give the spoon
away' or ins Gras beißen 'to bite into the grass' or
sich die Radieschen von unten ansehen 'look at the radishes
from underneath'
- Greek: τινάζω τα πέταλα 'to shake the
horse-shoes'
- Italian: tirare le cuoia 'to pull the skins',
- Latvian: nolikt karoti 'to put the spoon down'[6]
- Lithuanian: pakratyti kojas 'to shake the
legs',
- Norwegian: å parkere tøflene 'to park the
slippers',
- Polish: kopnąć w kalendarz 'to kick the
calendar', wąchać kwiatki od spodu 'smell the flowers
from underneath', wyciągnąć kopyta 'to stretch the
hooves'
- Portuguese: bater as botas 'to beat the
boots', esticar o pernil 'to stretch the leg', or
fazer tijolo 'to make a brick', plus comer capim pela
raiz 'to eat grass by the root', abotoar o paletó 'to
button up the blazer/coat', esticar as canelas 'to
stretch the shanks',
- Romanian: a da colțul 'to turn the corner',
- Russian: сыграть в ящик (s'igrat' v yaschik)
'to play into the box', дать дуба, откинуть копыта
- Spanish: estirar la pata 'to stretch one's
leg',
- Swedish: trilla av pinnen 'to fall off the
stick', or ta ner skylten 'take the sign down',
- Ukrainian: врізати дуба 'to cut the oak (as in
building a coffin)'.
Finally, in Brazil, the expression chutar o balde 'to kick the
bucket' has a completely different meaning: it means 'to give up on a
difficult task (since a person coming to the end of their patience might
kick a bucket in frustration)'.
Some idioms, in contrast, are transparent.[7]
Much of their meaning does get through if they are taken (or translated)
literally. For example, lay one's cards on the table meaning to
reveal previously unknown intentions, or to reveal a secret.
Transparency is a matter of degree; spill the beans (to let
secret information become known) and leave no stone unturned (to
do everything possible in order to achieve or find something) are not
entirely literally interpretable, but only involve a slight metaphorical
broadening. Another category of idioms is a word having several
meanings, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes discerned from the context
of its usage. This is seen in the (mostly un-inflected)
English language in
polysemes, the common use of the same word for an activity, for
those engaged in it, for the product used, for the place or time of an
activity, and sometimes for a
verb.
Idioms tend to confuse those unfamiliar with them; students of a new
language must learn its idiomatic expressions as vocabulary. Many
natural language words have idiomatic origins, but are
assimilated, so losing their figurative senses, for example, in
Portuguese, the expression saber de coração 'to know by heart',
with the same meaning as in English, was shortened to 'saber de cor',
and, later, to the verb decorar, meaning memorize.
Syntax
The non-compositionality of meaning of idioms challenges theories of
syntax. The fixed words of many idioms do not qualify as
constituents in any sense, e.g.
-
- a. How do we get to the bottom of this situation?
The fixed words of this idiom (in bold) do not form a constituent in
any theory's analysis of syntactic structure because the object of the
preposition (here this situation) is not part of the idiom (but
rather it is an
argument of the idiom). One can know that it is not part of the
idiom because it is variable, e.g. How do we get to the bottom of
this situation / the claim / the phenomenon / her statement / etc.
What this means is that theories of syntax that take the constituent to
be the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis are challenged. The manner
in which units of meaning are assigned to units of syntax remains
unclear. This problem has motivated a tremendous amount of discussion
and debate in linguistics circles and it is a primary motivator behind
the
Construction Grammar framework.[8]
A relatively recent development in the syntactic analysis of idioms
departs from a constituent-based account of syntactic structure,
preferring instead the
catena-based account.[9]
Any word or any combination of words that are linked together by
dependencies qualifies as a catena.[10]
The words constituting idioms are stored as catenae in the lexicon, and
as such, they are concrete units of syntax. The
dependency grammar trees of a few sentences containing
non-constituent idioms illustrate the point:
-
-
The fixed words of the idiom (in orange) in each case are linked
together by dependencies; they form a catena. The material that is
outside of the idiom (in normal black script) is not part of the idiom.
The following two trees illustrate proverbs:
-
-
The fixed words of the proverbs (in orange) again form a catena each
time. The adjective nitty-gritty and the adverb always are
not part of the respective proverb and their appearance does not
interrupt the fixed words of the proverb. A caveat concerning the
catena-based analysis of idioms concerns their status in the lexicon.
Idioms are lexical items, which means they are stored as catenae in the
lexicon. In the actual syntax, however, some idioms can be broken up by
various functional constructions.
The catena-based analysis of idioms provides a basis for an
understanding of meaning compositionality. The
Principle of Compositionality can in fact be maintained. Units of
meaning are being assigned to catenae, whereby many of these catenae are
not constituents.
See also
Notes
-
^
See the The Oxford companion to the
English language(1992:495f.).
-
^
Concerning the estimate of the
number of idioms in the English language, see Jackendoff (1997).
-
^
That compositionality is the key
notion for the analysis of idioms is emphasized in most accounts
of idioms, e.g. Radford (2004:187f.). The principle of
compositionality is introduced and explained at an introductory
level by Portner (2005:33f).
-
^
See Mel’čuk (1995:167-232).
-
^
For Saeed's definition, see Saeed
(2003:60).
-
^
The Oxford Companion to the English
Language (1992): 495f.
-
^
Concerning the transparency of some
idioms, see Gibbs, R. W. (1987)
-
^
For an example of the discussion of
the difficulty that the non-compositionality of idioms has
motivated, see for instance Culicver and Jackendoff
(2005:32ff.).
-
^
The catena unit was introduced to
linguistics by William O'Grady (1998).
-
^
For a definition of the catena and
discussion, see Osborne and Groß (2012:173ff.).
References
- Crystal, A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 4th
edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
- Culicover, P. and R. Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- Gibbs, R. 1987. Linguistic factors in children's
understanding of idioms. Journal of Child Language, 14, 569–586.
- Jackendoff, R. 1997. The architecture of the language
faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Jurafsky, D. and J. Martin. 2008. Speech and language
processing: An introduction to natural language processing,
computational linguistics, and speech recognition. Dorling
Kindersley (India): Pearson Education, Inc.
- Leaney, C. 2005. In the know: Understanding and using
idioms. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Mel’čuk, I. 1995. Phrasemes in language and phraseology in
linguistics. In M. Everaert, E.-J. van der Linden, A. Schenk and
R. Schreuder (eds.), Idioms: Structural and psychological
perspectives, 167–232. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- O’Grady, W. 1998. The syntax of idioms. Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 16, 79-312.
- Osborne, T. and T. Groß 2012. Constructions are catenae:
Construction Grammar meets Dependency Grammar. Cognitive
Linguistics 23, 1, 163-214.
- Portner, P. 2005. What is meaning?: Fundamentals of formal
semantics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
- Radford, A. English syntax: An introduction. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
- Saeed, J. 2003. Semantics. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
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