Idiom

For other uses, see Idiom (disambiguation).

An idiom (Template:Lang-la, "special property", f. [ἰδίωμα – idiōma] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help), "special feature, special phrasing", f. [ἴδιος – idios] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help), "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. 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.

Examples

The following sentences contain idioms. The fixed words constituting the idiom in each case are bolded:

a. She is pulling my leg. - to pull someone's leg means to trick them by telling them something untrue.

b. When will you drop them a line? - to drop someone a line means to phone or send a note to someone.

c. You should keep an eye out for that. - to keep an eye out for something means to maintain awareness of it.

d. I can't keep my head above water. - to keep one's head above water means to manage a situation.

e. It's raining cats and dogs. - raining cats and dogs means it's raining really hard (a downpour).

Each of the word combinations in bold has at least two meanings: a literal meaning and a figurative meaning. Pulling someone's leg means either that you literally grab their leg and yank it, or figuratively, it means that you tease them by telling them a fictitious story. Such expressions that are typical for a language can appear as words, combinations of words, phrases, entire clauses, and entire sentences. Idiomatic expressions in the form of entire sentences are called proverbs, if they refer to a universal truth e.g.

g. The devil is in the details.

h. The early bird gets the worm.

i. Break a leg.

j. Waste not, want not.

Proverbs such as these have figurative meaning. When one says "The devil is in the details", one is not expressing a belief in demons, but rather one means that things may look good on the surface, but upon scrutiny, problems are revealed.

Compositionality or lack thereof

In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality. 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. John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term. 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, 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',

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'

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. 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.

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. Any word or any combination of words that are linked together by dependencies qualifies as a catena. 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

• Adage
• Befudiom
• Catena
• Chengyu
• Cliché
• Collocation
• Principle of compositionality
• Dependency grammar
• Double negative
• Figure of speech
• List of idioms in the English language
• Idiom in English language

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.

External links

• Figures of Speech by Rob Bradshaw
• American idioms at Learning English Feels Good
• American Idiomatic Expressions, based on the book A Dictionary of American Idioms
• Dictionary of English Idioms & Idiomatic Expressions
• The Phrase Finder
• idioms.in
• Today's English Idioms at GoEnglish.com
• Babelite - Cross-language Dictionary of Idioms - English, French, Portuguese