Idiom
An idiom (Latin: idioma, "special property", f. Greek: ἰδίωμα – idiōma, "special feature, special phrasing", f. Greek: ἴδιος – idios, "one’s own") is a combination of words that have a figurative meaning owing to its common usage. An idiom's figurative meaning is separate from the literal meaning.[1] There are thousands of idioms and they occur frequently in all languages. There are estimated to be at least twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions in the English language.[2]
Examples
The following sentences contain idioms. The fixed words constituting the idiom in each case are bolded:[3]
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 send a note to or call someone.
c. You should keep an eye out for that. - to kep an eye out for something means to maintain awareness of it so that you notice it as it occurs.
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. - to rain cats and dogs means to rain very heavily (a downpour).
f. Oh no! You spilled the beans! - to spill the beans means to let out a secret.
g. Why are you feeling blue? - to feel blue means to feel sad.
h. That jacket costs an arm and a leg. – an arm and a leg means something is very expensive.
i. It is not rocket science. – not rocket science means something is not difficult.
j. Put a cork in it. - put a cork in it is an impolite way to say, "shut up!" (another idiom), be quiet, and stop talking.
Each of the word combinations in bold has at least two meanings: a literal meaning and a figurative meaning. 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[4] if they refer to a universal truth.
k. The devil is in the details.
l. The early bird gets the worm.
m. Break a leg.
n. Waste not, want not.o. Go take a pill.p. I have butterflies in my stomach.
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 scrrutiny, undesirable aspects are revealed.
Derivations
Many idiomatic expressions, in their original use were not figurative but had literal meaning.
For instance: spill the beans meaning to let out a secret probably originates in a physical spilling of beans which are either being eaten or measured out. The point is that the spiller certainly does not want to lose any beans.
let the cat out of the bag : has a meaning similar to the former, but the secret revealed in this case will likely cause some problems. A cat was sometimes put in bags to keep it under control or to pretend that it was a more saleable animal, such as a pig or a rabbit. So, to let the cat out of the bag suggests either that the ruse is revealed or that the situation is out of control.
break a leg: meaning good luck in a performance/presentation etc. This common idiom comes from superstition. It was thought that there were gremlins or sprites, little fairy-like creatures, backstage in theaters who would do exactly the opposite of whatever they were told. To say break a leg was to ensure the sprites would not in fact do the performers any damage.
Compositionality
Love is blind
In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality.[5] 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.[6] John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term.[7] 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.
Dealing with non-compositionality
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.[10]
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.[11] Any word or any combination of words that are linked together by dependencies qualifies as a catena.[12] 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:
