Author: Franziska Hill
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638630714
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 15
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: “Such expressions are termed idioms, defined as groups of words with set meanings that cannot be calculated by adding up the separate meanings of the parts” (Heidi Anders 1995, 17). Idioms have a semantic productivity which means ‘die wendungsinternen Bedeutungen einzelner Idiom-Konstituenten werden beim Konstruieren der Äußerung produktiv eingesetzt’ and a discourse productivity: the possibility to interpret the constituents of an idiom as autonomous, semantically ambivalent entities (Dobrovols’kij 1997, 22). An idiom can also be seen as a lexical unit, which formally consists of several words, but semantically be a whole and will be treated and saved like words. (Dobrovols’kij 1997, 51) There is a great variety within idioms of their degree of flexibility anyhow an idiom is a lexical unit. Everybody intuitively can realize an idiom as an idiom because of different characteristics, e.g. several combinations and different intension. All fixed word-complexes are reproducible. Idioms are an open class, in the core there are the more idiomaticised idioms and in the periphery they are less idiomatic. But if the hearer does not know an idiom, it is no idiom. Idioms differ in relation to proverbs mainly in semiotic-semantic parameters. Proverbs have a discursive autonomy and are quoted as ‘texts’, idioms instead are reproduced as lexical units. Another difference is that proverbs verbalize ‘general truth’ and fall back on shared knowledge of the people. An idiom comes into existence if one uses a phrase or sentence about a common situation or object in a figurative manner. The phrase has to be especially to the point, expressive or pictographic. This new expression will be consolidated and lexicalised and after that it will be taken into normal speech. Most idioms are stylistically neutral, but they can also be on a stylisticly lower or higher level. Archaic, literary, foreign and formal words belong to the higher level, whereas colloquial, jargon, slang and vulgar words belong to the lower level. Especially the lower level is highly idiomaticised. The usage of idioms plays a role in the social positioning of conversational partners and to consolidate a social hierarchy. An idiom is more informative than its simple lexical counterpart.
Author: Adam Makkai
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110812673
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Author: Martin Everaert
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317780736
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of lexicology/lexicography. The chapters address the status of idioms in recent formal and experimental linguistic theorizing. Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions are written by psycholinguists and theoretical and computational linguists who take mutual advantage of progress in all disciplines. Linguists supply the facts and analyses psycholinguists base their models and experiments on; psycholinguists in turn confront linguistic models with psycholinguistic findings. Computational linguists build natural language processing systems on the basis of models and frameworks provided by theoretical linguists and, sometimes psycholinguists, and set up large corpora to test linguistic hypotheses. Besides the fascination for idioms that make up such a large part of our knowledge of language, interdisciplinarity is one of the attractions of investigations in idiomatic language and language processing.
Author: Cristina Cacciari
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Leon Jaeger
Publisher: Bern : P. Lang
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Author: Logan Pearsall Smith
Publisher: Boston, Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Author: Andreas Langlotz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027293767
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.
Author: Teodora Hristova
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656734240
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 105
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Book Description
Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, University of Hannover, language: English, abstract: The central topic of the present paper are the idioms in the English language. Interesting and peculiar, they are a very important part of the lexicon and exist in every language - even the artificial languages may produce idioms. In some earlier studies on idioms it has been claimed that they are nothing more than a fixed string of words with a meaning, different from the meanings of its composite elements. Psycholinguists have lent a hand in supporting this view as well. Scholars generally have assumed that idioms exist as frozen, semantic units within a speaker’s mental lexicon in the same way that words or stings of them are represented mentally (Gibbs, 1993: 57). Thus they need separate entries in the dictionaries and have to be learned by heart and kept in mind as single words - so they appear to be nothing more than long lexemes. Idioms have been also commonly thought of as metaphors that have become fixed or fossilized over time and have become “dead” expressions in a language. Taking this into consideration, in this paper I aim at proving that idioms are not as frozen and fixed as they are supposed to be and that on the contrary, these expressions are quite “alive” - varying, changing and coloring the language. Actually long time has passed and a lot of research has been done since the time when idioms were defined as completely frozen items and kick the bucket was a representative example of a typical idiom. Idioms are no longer considered just expressions the meaning of which cannot be understood from the meanings of their constituents. During the last few decades of research many investigations in various branches of linguistics - sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics or corpus linguistics, to name a few, have proved that idioms are much more than a simple fixed string of words with own meaning. Now we know that there are quite a large number of idiomatic expressions in language, varying in their degree of compositionality, fixedness and opacity. In spite of the fact that idioms have been always considered to belong to the group of the fixed expressions, nowadays their absolute fixedness is a myth. In fact, different authors in the idiom literature give varying degrees of importance to this property. Sinclair (1996: 83) has reached to the conclusion that the “so-called ‘fixed expressions’ are not in fact fixed” and then Moon (1998: 2) put also an emphasis on the fact that “many fixed expressions ...
Author: Anna Dąbrowska
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527516784
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Since the general tendencies of present-day English focus more on idiomatic usage, it seems to be worth paying attention to the role phraseological units play in a language. In the field of English phraseology, linguists have shown a constant interest in idioms. Undoubtedly, not only are idioms an important part of the language and culture of the society, but they also carry more impact than non-idiomatic expressions because of their close identification with a particular language and culture. It is difficult to speak or write English without using idioms, especially while describing one’s emotional or mental condition. Therefore, it is interesting and worthwhile to to analyse both the language of phraseological units and emotions. In other words, this book focuses not only on idioms, but also on one’s psychological condition. However, its purpose is neither to discuss the issues of idioms and emotions from the psychological point of view, nor provide a conceptual analysis of emotional metaphors. Instead, the book analyses idioms referring to psychological states in English from the perspective of syntax, focusing particularly both on the syntactic structure of this specific set of verbal psych-idioms, and on the constraints on the way they are built. Therefore, the most current studies, performed within the scope of the Phase Theory and the Idioms as Phases Hypothesis are chosen to address certain syntactic problems that idioms pose.
Author: D. J. Allerton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Phraseology
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Phraseological Units: basic concepts and their applicationPhraseology, an established concept in central and eastern Europe, has in recent years received increasing attention in the English-speaking world. It has long been clear to language learners and teachers that a native speaker's competence in a language goes well beyond a lexico-semantic knowledge of the individual words and the grammatical rules for combining them into sentences; linguistic competence also includes a familiarity with restricted collocations (like break the rules), idioms (like spill the beans in a non-literal sense) and proverbs (like Revenge is sweet), as well as the ability to produce or understand metaphorical interpretations. The first five papers of this volume set out to define the basic phraseological concepts collocation, idiom, proverb, metaphor and the related one of compound (-word). The remaining six papers explore a series of issues involving analytic, quantitative, computational and lexicographic aspects of phraseological units. The volume, as a whole, is a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to this blossoming field of linguistics.
