Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T03:44:56.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Idiom as the intersection of conceptual and syntactic schemas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2014

DANIEL SANFORD
DANIEL SANFORD*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two key issues in the study of idiom are the metaphorical status of idioms (whether or not underlying metaphors are active in the on-line processing of figurative idiomatic expressions) and the compositional status of idioms (whether or not the overall meaning of such expressions is analyzable from internal elements). This study addresses these questions from the perspective of emergent metaphor theory (Sanford, 2012, 2013), arguing that key properties of such expressions − idiosyncrasy of both form and meaning, the potential for idiom to be manipulated in discourse, and diachronic patterns in changes of idiomatic meaning − follow from the status of metaphorical idioms as highly entrenched instances of both conceptual and syntactic mappings. In the case of both types of schema, the interaction of type and token frequency effects predict the metaphoricity and analyzability of idioms.

Keywords

idiomschemametaphorconstructionsconstruction grammaremergent metaphor theory
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 492 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

references

Aitchision, J. (1987). Words in the mind: an introduction to the mental lexicon. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Allbritton, D. W., McKoon, G., & Gerrig, R. J. (1995). Metaphor-based schemata and text representations: making connections through conceptual metaphors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 612−625.Google Scholar
Barlow, M., & Kemmer, S. (1994). A schema-based approach to grammatical description. In Luna, S. D., Corrigan, R. L., & Iverson, G. K. (Eds.), The reality of linguistic rules (pp. 19−42). New York / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Billig, M., & MacMillan, K. (2005). Metaphor, idiom and ideology: the search for ‘no smoking guns’ across time. Discourse & Society, 16(4), 459−480.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D. (1981). Two kinds of vowels, two kinds of rhythm. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Bowdle, B. F., and Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112(1), 193−216.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Branigan, H., Pickering, M., & Cleland, A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75, B13–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology: a study of the relation between meaning and form. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (1995). Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10, 425−455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2006). From usage to grammar: the mind’s response to repetition. Language, 82(4), 711−733.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J., & Thompson, S. (1997). Three frequency effects in syntax. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 23, 378−388.Google Scholar
Cacciari, C., & Tabossi, P. (1988). The comprehension of idioms. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 668−683.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, L., & Deignan, A. (2006). The emergence of metaphor in discourse. Applied Linguistics, 27(4), 671−690.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, D. (1986). Metaphor. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronk, B., Lima, S., & Schweigert, W. (1993). Idioms in sentences: effects of frequency, literalness, and familiarity. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 59−82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dabrowska, E. (2006). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Linguistics, 11(1/2), 83–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, M. (2008−) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 385 million words, 1990−present, online <http://www.americancorpus.org>..>Google Scholar
Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and corpus linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Espinal, T., & Mateu, J. (2010). On classes of idioms and their interpretation. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1397−1411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, C., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. (1988). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: the case of let ‘alone’. Language, 64, 501−538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, C., & Housum, J. (1987). Talkers’ signalling of ‘new” and “old’ words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 489−504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. (1994). The poetics of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W., Bogdanovich, J. M., Sykes, J. R., & Barr, D. J. (1997). Metaphor in idiom comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 141−154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, R. W., & O’Brien, J. E. (1990). Idioms and mental imagery: the metaphoric motivation for idiomatic meaning. Cognition, 36, 35−68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Giora, R. (2002). Literal vs. figurative language: different or equal? Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 487−506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glasbey, S. (2003). Let’s paint the town red for a few hours: composition of aspect in idioms. Proceedings of the ACL 2003 Workshop on Lexicon and Figurative Language, 14, 43−49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glucksberg, S., Brown, M., & McGlone, M. S. (1993). Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 21(5), 711−719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: a construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gregory, M., Raymond, W., Bell, A., Fosler-Lussier, E., & Jurafsky, D. (1999). The effects of collocational strength and contextual predictability in lexical production. Papers from the Regional Meetings, Chicago Linguistic Society 35, 151−166.Google Scholar
Gries, S. T. (2005). Syntactic priming: a corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34, 365–399.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamblin, J., & Gibbs, R. (1999). Why you can’t kick the bucket as you slowly die: verbs in idiom comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28(1), 25−39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1992). Babe Ruth homered his way into the hearts of America. In Stowell, Tim and Wehrli, Eric (Eds.), Syntax and the lexicon (pp. 155−178). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keysar, B., Shen, Y., Glucksberg, S., & Horton, W. (2000). Conventional language: how metaphorical is it? Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 576−593.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1987). The death of dead metaphor. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 2(2), 143−147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1992). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Ortony, Andrew (Ed.), Metaphor and thought, 2nd ed. (pp. 202−251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G., Espenson, J., & Schwartz, A. (1991). The master metaphor list. Draft 2nd ed. Technical Report, University of California at Berkeley, online: <http://araw.mede.uic.edu/∼alansz/metaphor/METAPHORLIST.pdf>..>Google Scholar
McGlone, M., Glucksberg, S., & Cacciari, C. (1994). Semantic productivity and idiom comprehension. Discourse Processes, 17, 167−190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, G., Sag, I., & Wasow, T. (1994). Idioms. Language, 70(3), 491−538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, S. (1980). The notion of the plural in Puerto Rican Spanish: competing constraints on (s) deletion. In Labov, W. (Ed.), Locating language in time and space (pp. 55−67). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sanford, D. R. (2008a). Metaphor and phonological reduction in English idiomatic expressions. Cognitive Linguistics, 19(4), 585–603.Google Scholar
Sanford, D. R. (2008b). Discourse & metaphor: a corpus-driven inquiry. Corpus Linguistics & Linguistic Theory, 4(2), 209−234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanford, D. R. (2012). Metaphors are conceptual schemata that are emergent over tokens of use. Journal of Cognitive Science, 13(3), 211−235.Google Scholar
Sanford, D. R. (2013). Emergent Metaphor Theory: frequency, schematic strength, and the processing of metaphorical utterances. Journal of Cognitive Science, 14(1), 1−45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scherre, M., & Naro, A. (1991). Marking in discourse: ‘birds of a feather’. Language Variation and Change, 3, 23–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strassler, J. (1982). Idioms in English. Tübingen: Gunter nar Verlag.Google Scholar
Taylor, J. (1998). Syntactic constructions as prototype categories. In Tomasello, M. (Ed.) The new psychology of language (pp. 177−202). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar