Fixed Expressions

7 Key excerpts on "Fixed Expressions"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Vocabulary

  Applied Linguistic Perspectives

  • Ronald Carter(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 but which (2) allows both for larger grammatical units to be built from their base, and for internal and external modification as more creative and cognitively richer speech is generated.

  Some examples of Fixed Expressions are: as a matter of fact, to smell a rat, as old as the hills, honesty is the best policy, further to my letter of the — th inst., spick and span, for good, if I were you, bottoms up, a watched pot never boils, a good time was had by all, light years ago, how do you do?, as far as I know, no way, you can say that again, in no uncertain terms, down with the Liberal Democrats, a stitch in time saves nine, I thought you’d never ask, by and large, like it or lump it. Such expressions as these are syntactically, semantically and discoursally varied, and classification necessarily involves some structural overlap. The tentative classification in Table 3.2 might, however, give an idea of the range of Fixed Expressions in the modern English lexicon as well as prepare some ground for the more formal recognition criteria suggested in the next section.

  The list contains Fixed Expressions which are generally known as clichés and proverbs. Proverbs have formal and semantic characteristics in common. For example they convey some kind of aphoristic truth, are usually in the simple present tense and are normally neither syntactically divisible nor substitutable (though this is not to say that creative mutations or distortions are not possible; see particularly Mackin, 1978 for a range of examples). On the other hand, the proverbs (1) honesty is the best policy, (2) a watched pot never boils and (3) a stitch in time saves nine display different degrees of semantic opacity. (1) can be derived from a knowledge of the individual constituent items, (2) is less transparent and requires a metaphoric-analogical interpretive process and (3) is semantically opaque, the meaning not being as openly recoverable. Clichés are like idioms in that they are Fixed Expressions but are unlike idioms in two important respects. They are more fixed than idioms in terms of syntactic, morphological and semantic commutability. Their meaning is usually derivable from the semantic sum of the individual constituent parts. When it is not derivable then features of the linguistic or social context will aid interpretation. For example, it is probable that ‘social’ clichés (social formulae/clichés at VII (i) in Table 3.2) like how do you do? (transparent) and bottoms up

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Advances in Written Text Analysis

  • Malcolm Coulthard(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 The analysis of Fixed Expressions in text

  Rosamund Moon

  In general, studies of Fixed Expressions—idioms, formulae such as proverbs and catchphrases, and anomalous or ill-formed collocations—concentrate on their typological and syntagmatic properties. Attention is given to such things as the degree of their lexical and syntactic frozenness, or their transformation potential; and even the primary characteristic of idioms, their non-compositionality as lexical units, may be seen as a matter of the interpretation of a syntagm. However, it is their paradigmatic properties which are of importance in relation to interaction. Fixed Expressions represent meaningful choices on the part of the speaker/writer. They are single choices (see Sinclair 1987b: 321 and passim), and, as with other kinds of lexical item, their precise values and force should be considered in terms of the paradigm operating at each slot or choice. By taking into account paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic aspects, it is possible to assess the way in which Fixed Expressions contribute to the content, structure and development of a text.

  Fixed Expressions, especially highly colourful and metaphorical idioms and proverbs, are comparatively infrequent. They appear to be more frequent in spoken text than written, although to date there are few extensive studies of their actual distribution. Strässler assesses the frequency of idioms, excluding phrasal verbs, in spoken discourse as around one per 4.5 minutes of conversation (1982:81). A survey of 240 English proverbs (Arnaud and Moon, forthcoming) finds that there are around 33 instances of proverbs per million words of OHPC,1 and that the average frequency of each of the proverbs is much less than one occurrence per million words: this list of proverbs consists of those best known to informants in a small survey, and it should be pointed out that the more frequent of these proverbs nearly always occur in exploited or truncated forms, not the canonical citation forms. So in setting out to evaluate the textual contribution of Fixed Expressions, it is in fact difficult to find a text where their density is sufficiently high to make valid observations. A densely populated text would be atypical; while a densely populated section of a text would be unrepresentative by being decontextualized. With these caveats, I want to consider an editorial from The Guardian

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Phraseology and Culture in English

  • Paul Skandera(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Fixed Expressions: Conceptual integration and formal integration We need to clarify how our above perspective relates to the study of Fixed Expressions and idiomaticity. In the standard view, idioms are regarded as fixed multi-word units which are, to varying degrees, non-compositional, i.e. their meaning cannot or not fully be recovered from the meaning of their constituents. 12 They thus form a subset of Fixed Expressions, along with lexicalized compounds, proper names, familiar quotes, etc. Besides the respective degree of compositionality, idioms are often classified according to criteria like transparency and syntactic flexibility (see Skandera 2003: ch. 2 for an overview of theoretical approaches to Fixed Expressions). It should have become apparent that our account is not specifically along these lines. In this paper, we approach Fixed Expressions from the angle of the underlying conceptualizations and neither compositionality nor syntac-tic behavior are our issues in the first place (for a brief discussion of some formal aspects, see, however, below). The linguistic examples given above for the information and ideas domain shall again serve as illustrations. The immediate relevancy to the study of Fixed Expressions should be obvious: All of the examples are strong collocations or even idiomatic and they are taken to be generated by conceptual metaphors. 13 Our starting point is the observation that a conceptual metaphor or me-tonymy may find its linguistic expression in various ways: The IDEAS ARE FOOD metaphor, for instance, is expressed as an NP in a meaty book . In to devour a book it is realized within a VP in communion with the AQUIRING KNOWLEDGE IS EATING metaphor.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Explorations in Pragmatics

  Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects

  • Istvan Kecskes, Laurence R. Horn(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The leading thought in present day linguistic research on meaning is that linguistic stimuli are just a guide in the performing of sophisticated inferences about each other’s states of minds and intentions. Linguistic units only prompt meaning construction. Formulaic expressions do not fit very well into this line of thinking because they usually have fixed meanings. They are like frozen implicatures. The modular view rarely works with Fixed Expressions. When situation-bound utterances such as Nice meeting you ; You’re all set ; How do you do? are used, there is usually just one way to understand their situational function. 3. English Lingua Franca database 3.1. Data collection and analysis Data were collected in spontaneous lingua franca communication. Participants were 13 adult individuals in two groups with the following first languages: Spanish, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Telugu, Korean and Russian. All subjects had spent a minimum of six months in the U.S. and had at least intermediate knowledge of English before arriving. Both Group 1 (7 students) and Group 2 (6 students) participated in a 30-minute discussion about the following topics: housing in the area, jobs, and local customs. The conversations were undirected and uncoached. Subjects said what they wanted. No native speaker was present. Conversations were recorded and then transcribed, which resulted in a 13,726 word database. After a week participants were given the chance to listen to their conversations and were asked to discuss their thought processes using a “think aloud” technique. Data analysis focused on the types of formulaic units given in Table 1 above. The questions I sought to answer can be summarized as follows: 198 Istvan Kecskes – How does the use of formulas relate to the ad hoc generated expressions in the data? – What type of Fixed Expressions did the subjects prefer? – What formulas did speakers create on their own? 3.2.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Incipient Productivity

  A Construction-Based Approach to Linguistic Creativity

  • Arne Zeschel(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  For instance, the term ‘multiword expression’ implies that the structure consists of more than one word (rather than morpheme) and the labels ‘idiom’ and ‘idiomaticity’ are cover terms for a whole syndrome of properties that go beyond lexical fix- edness alone (see references in chapter 2). Up to this point in the exposi- tion, I have used the terms ‘collocation’ and ‘fixed expression’, and I will continue to use them to designate the following phenomenon: A sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated; that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analy- sis by the language grammar. (Wray 2002: 9) It is the introduction of variation (i.e. unconventional lexical instantiations) into such chunks (i.e. lexically specific constructions) that will be under- stood as ‘linguistic creativity’ in this study – in this following Tomasello’s (1998: 433) position that “much of the creativity of language comes from fitting specific words into linguistic constructions that are non-prototypical for them”. Following Israel (1996, 2002), I assume that linguistic creativity thus conceived is driven by the interplay of two complementary mecha- nisms: on the one hand, the capacity for flexible analogical extension, where an existing expression is extended to a contextually related variant in order to meet the demands of the present discourse situation. And on the other hand, a cognitive pressure to maximise similarity across linguistic representations through generalisation. In the words of Israel (2002), children learning a language, and speakers in general, represent linguistic units in ways that maximize their motivation and emphasize their common- alities. Two units are consistent with each other to the degree that they match in their formal and semantic specifications.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  English as a Lingua Franca

  A Corpus-based Analysis

  • Luke Prodromou(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  These syntactic frames are partially lexicalized -i.e. they behave like 'long words' - but they also have a margin for variation. The explanation for the mystery of 'native-like fluency' lies, then, in the user's access to a body of sentence stems which are institutionalized or, in other words, widely known and accepted in the community . The concept of 'institutionalized' language locates phraseology firmly within a social and cultural context; the spontaneous production of lexicalized sentence stems and idiomatic phrases, argue Pawiey and Syder, presupposes 'the authority of regular and accepted use by members of the speech community' (Pawley and Syder 1983: 209). Fixed phrases are the tip of a cultural iceberg. Thus a simple lexical restriction such as that on the lexical pattern ache, which permits headache, toothache, backache, stomach-ache, earache, but not *legache or *fingerache, is explicable in terms of culturally recognized types of disability (Pawley and Syder 1983: 209). There is a paradoxical element in the semantico-grammatical behaviour of these stems and idiomatic phrases in that they can be both fixed and flexible in varying degrees. The 'native-speaker' moves up and down this fixed-variable continuum with ease (Pawley and Syder 1983: 218). Moreover, the facility with which ready-made strings can be recalled and applied in discourse leaves the brain free to manage the more generative grammatical structure of the discourse, the larger discourse structure as well as to produce novel variations on the fixed elements of language (Pawley and Syder 1983: 208). This phraseological competence is not innate, but is acquired through repeated exposure in socio-cultural contexts from an early age; there is evidence that the process of acquisition of phraseological competence begins in early childhood: That children do store and use complex strings before mastering their internal make-up is generally agreed.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Idioms

  Description, Comprehension, Acquisition, and Pedagogy

  • Dilin Liu(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For example, Biber et al. (1999, p. 1024), in their comprehensive English grammar book, define idioms as “expressions with a meaning not entirely derivable from the meaning of their parts.” Similarly, the Cambridge dictionary of American idioms (2003), for example, defines idioms as follows: “An idiom is a phrase whose meaning is different from the meanings of each word considered separately. These phrases have a fixed form—they usually cannot be changed” (p. ix). ESL idiom publications often place a special emphasis on the invariance of structure as the most important feature of idioms. For instance, McMordie (1972), in the book English Idioms, states emphatically, “As a general rule an idiomatic phrase cannot be altered; no other synonymous word can be substituted for any word in the phrase, and the arrangement of the words can rarely be modified” (p. 6). This invariance feature presupposes that idioms are multiword expressions. Cowie and Mackin (1975) make the point very clear in their Oxford dictionary of current idiomatic English, for they begin their idiom definition by saying, “an idiom is a combination of two or more words which function as a unit of meaning” (p. ix). The reason for excluding single words as idioms for L2 learners is rather simple and obvious: no matter how difficult it is, a single word is just an individual vocabulary item, and to learn it is basically the same as to grasp any other regular individual word. Learning idioms, on the other hand, is a different matter as it involves the challenge of not only figuring out their unique meanings but also dealing with their invariance or restricted variance in form. In short, for L2 learners, idioms are perhaps best defined as multiword expressions that are invariant or variance-restricted in structure and often (not always) non- or semi-literal in meaning

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book