|
1.1 The meaning of idioms
An idiom is a group of words that have a different meaning than if you understood each word individually. Idioms enrich the language by assisting us in emphasizing meaning and making our observations, judgments, and explanations lively and interesting. They're also great for communicating a lot of information in a short amount of time.
Knowing whether an expression has a literal or idiomatic meaning is critical for natural language processing applications that require semantic interpretation.Idioms are prevalent in all forms of language use. The problem they present to theoretical and computational linguists is not that their meaning cannot be determined by standard mechanisms; if it weren't for other factors, this could be overcome by treating them as 'big' lexical items that can be looked up in a list in a fairly straightforward manner.
Idioms are expressions that do not literally mean what they say. You cannot comprehend the meaning of an idiom by combining the meanings of its constituent words. To put it as simply as possible, an idiom is a fixed expression whose meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of its constituent parts.Thus, the phrase "kick the bucket" has nothing to do with kicking or buckets, but simply means "to die." Idioms have only one meaning and are lexically and grammatically stable. When you look at the individual words, it may not even make grammatical sense. An idiom, according to M. Everaert (1995), is an institutionalized expression whose overall meaning does not correspond to the sum of its component parts. Many idioms are intuitively opaque: their meaning is difficult to guess without a specific context or prior exposure. Despite this, very few idioms have fixed forms. These characteristics will be discussed in the following chapter.
1.2 The structure of idioms
Idioms are not mixed in form, as stated in the previous chapter. Someone has been around the block (a few minutes), for example, can be said without the words a few times, but the meaning remains the same. This technique is also used for idioms that have become cliches and are thus frequently shortened, such as you can lead a horse to water (but not make him drink). Depending on what the speaker is describing, any word can be inserted into some idioms. In the idiom the ___ of someone's dreams, for example, the underline space indicates that the number of nouns, adjectives, and so on that could be inserted is limitless.
Furthermore, the main idiom may have several less popular variants. For instance, sell like hotcakes (go like hot cakes). It demonstrates that idioms are not fixed units. Some changes may be found in the internal structure of idioms. Let us begin with the most basic modification of an idiom from its base form: morphology:
1.
a. I will call them out on their laziness.
b. I'm chastising them for their laziness.
c. I chastised them for their laziness.
d. I have chastised them for their laziness.
2.
a. Both George and Simon have ups and downs.
b. George and Simon are experiencing ups and downs.
c. George and Simon experienced ups and downs.
We will analyze the idioms that take NP to task and have one's ups and downs to be the listed forms of the idioms in (1) and (2) in these example sets (2). These examples clearly demonstrate that the verb tense can be changed within the idiom's internal structure. We can conclude that "completely frozen" idioms exhibit this type of behavior (trip the light fantastic vs. tripping the light fantastic vs. tripping the light fantastic) (M. Everaert: 1995:45).
Individual words in an idiom cannot be replaced by synonyms and still retain the idiomatic reading of the phrase, as has been widely observed. This is what makes them fixed forms. A speaker can use synonymy to create a new sentence with the same semantic meaning in most non-idiomatic discourse. That is, if we replace a word in the idiom with its synonym, we will not get the synonymic idiom. Despite this, idioms can be used interchangeably. As an example:
John had passed away.
John stomped on the pail.
One thing that stands out about idioms is that many of them appear to resist transformations that similar non-idiomatic constructions can easily undergo while retaining the same sense.
As an example:
John kicked the bucket.
The bucket was kicked by John.
In spite of that sentence is transformed its meaning remains the same.
All these changes can be found in all categories of idioms.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
