Nukus state pedagogical institute foreign language faculty english language and literature department

Commonly Confused Idioms.

Different From - The preferred preposition with different is from, although different than is common in speech. However, most authorities will accept different than in a sentence like “Ice cream tastes different than it did when I was a kid,” because otherwise you’d have to resort to some wordier construction like “Ice cream tastes different from how it tasted when I was a kid.”

Take for Granted - It’s easy to mishear this one as take for granite. It does kind of make sense, after all. Taking something for granted means that we fail to appreciate it because it seems like it has always been there and always will be. Granite is pretty long-lasting, right? But what the expression really means is that we mistakenly believe that something has been permanently granted to us.

Just Deserts - Just deserts is another example of an idiom that preserves an obsolete form of a word that has fallen out of use outside this particular expression. The phrase is often incorrectly written as just desserts because that’s the way we pronounce it. But in fact, this expression has nothing to do with cake and ice cream or with hot, sandy wastelands. When we say someone got their just deserts we mean that they got what was coming to them. Or, to put it another way, they got what they deserve. Deserts is an archaic noun form of deserve.

“Idiom” is not originally an English word - it is one of the many that have come into the language from Greek. “Idiom” means “one of a kind” and indicates that a phrase is being used with a special meaning that can be very different to the literal meaning.

Many idiomatic expressions, in their original use, were not figurative but had literal meaning.

For instance: spill the beans, meaning to reveal a secret, originates from an ancient method of democratic voting, wherein a voter would put a bean into one of several cups to indicate which candidate he wanted to cast his vote for. If the jars were spilled before the counting of votes was complete, anyone would be able to see which jar had more beans, and therefore which candidate was the winner. Over time, the practice was discontinued and the idiom became figurative.

Break a leg: meaning good luck in a performance or presentation. It is unclear how this common idiom originated, but many have it coming from belief in superstitions in one way or another. A particularly simple one says that it comes from the belief that one ought not to utter the words "good luck" to an actor. By wishing someone bad luck, it is cynically supposed that the opposite will occur.

In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality. That compositionality is the key notion for the analysis of idioms is emphasized in most accounts of idioms. 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 make 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. John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilized term. [38, 60] 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. "Chips and dip" is an irreversible binomial, but it refers to literal food items, not idiomatic ones.

Idioms possess varying degrees of mobility. While some idioms are used only in a routine form, others can undergo syntactic modifications such as passivization, raising constructions, and clefting, demonstrating separable constituencies within the idiom. Mobile idioms, allowing such movement, maintain their idiomatic meaning where fixed idioms do not:

Mobile: I spilled the beans on our project. > The beans were spilled on our project.

Fixed: The old man kicked the bucket. > The bucket was kicked (by the old man).

Many fixed idioms lack semantic composition, meaning that the idiom contains the semantic role of a verb, but not of any object. This is true of kick the bucket, which means die. By contrast, the semantically composite idiom “spill the beans”, meaning reveal a secret, contains both a semantic verb and object, reveal and secret. Semantically composite idioms have a syntactic similarity between their surface and semantic forms.

The types of movement allowed for certain idiom also relates to the degree to which the literal reading of the idiom has a connection to its idiomatic meaning. This is referred to as motivation or transparency. While most idioms that do not display semantic composition generally do not allow non-adjectival modification, those that are also motivated allow lexical substitution. For example, oil the wheels and grease the wheels allow variation for nouns that elicit a similar literal meaning. These types of changes can occur only when speakers can easily recognize a connection between what the idiom is meant to express and its literal meaning, thus an idiom like kick the bucket cannot occur as kick the pot.

From the perspective of dependency grammar, idioms are represented as a catena which cannot be interrupted by non-idiomatic content. Although syntactic modifications introduce disruptions to the idiomatic structure, this continuity is only required for idioms as lexical entries [36, 279].

Certain idioms, allowing unrestricted syntactic modification, can be said to be metaphors. Expressions such as jump on the bandwagon, pull strings, and draw the line all represent their meaning independently in their verbs and objects, making them compositional. In the idiom jump on the bandwagon, jump on involves joining something and a 'bandwagon' can refer to a collective cause, regardless of context [38, 70].