Gibbs, Syntactic Frozenness in Processing and Remembering Idioms

8/15/2019 Gibbs, Syntactic Frozenness in Processing and Remembering Idioms

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Cogni t i on, 20 (1985) 243-259

3

Syntactic frozenness in processing and remembering

idioms

RAYMOND W. GIBBS, Jr.

GAYLE P. GONZALES

Uni versi t y f Cali fornia, Santa Cruz

Abstract

Three experi ments exami ned t he eff ect of synt act i c ro .zenness on underst andi ng

and memory for i di omat i c expressi ons. I n Experi ment 1 w e est abl i shed a ro-

zenness cont i nuum by aski ng subj ect s to j udge w het her idi oms in di fferent

synt acti c orms mai nt ai ned thei r di omat i c meani ngs. The resul t s of Experi ment

2 indicated

that

subjects processed idi omat i c

expressions

more quickly than

t hey did noni di omat i c, control st ri ngs. Moreover, subjects are aster at proces-

si ng frozen idi oms than t hey are at understandi ng f l exible ones. The fi nal

experi ment found t hat he degree of synt act i c rozenness has an eff ect on memo-

ry or i dioms in t hat 7exibl e i di oms w ere recal l ed more oft en than w ere rozen

ones. These data overal l support t he i dea that di oms are part of t he normal

l exi con, but are accessed di fferent i al l y accordi ng t o t hei r degree of synt acti c

f

ozenness.

Introduction

Idiomatic expressions differ in the extent to which they can be syntactically

transformed and still retain their idiomatic meanings. Thus,

John kicked the

bucket can be interpreted as “John died,”

but its passive form,

The bucket

w as ki cked by John,

is usually not seen as having an idiomatic meaning.

Other idioms, such as

John t hrew in t he t ow el

(meaning “John gave up”) can

be passivized, as in

The t ow el was hrow n in by John,

and still be thought of

as idiomatic. Fraser (1970) has suggested that idioms do not form a homoge-

neous class with respect to the transformations they may undergo. He propo-

*This research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

We wish to thank Keith Brittany, Elizabeth Fekkes, and Wayne Iba for their assistance in running subjects

and Rachel Mueller for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Reprint requests may be sent to:

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Program in Experimental Psychology, Clark Kerr Hall, University of California,

Santa Cruz, CA 95064, U.S.A.

OOlO-0277/85/ 5.60

0 Elsevier Sequoia/Printed in The Netherlands


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244

R. W. Gibbs and G. P. Gonzales

sed that idioms could be organized into a “frozenness hierarchy” ranging

from expressions which undergo nearly all traditional transformations without

losing their idiomatic meanings (e.g.,

“throw in the towel”) to those expres-

sions which will not undergo even the most simple transformations and still

retain their idiomatic interpretations (e.g., “face the music”).

The purpose of the present paper is to show that people are indeed sensi-

tive to the syntactic frozenness of idioms and that this affects processing and

memory for these expressions. Previous research on this issue failed to find

any effect of syntactic frozenness on the speed with which idioms are proces-

sed. Swinney and Cutler (1979) examined the time it took subjects to verify

idioms, which differed in their frozenness level, as being meaningful English

phrases. Their results showed no significant differences in processing times

among different levels of Fraser’s (1970) hierarchy. Swinney and Cutler sug-

gested that these data support the idea “that idioms are to some extent unified

with respect to access, retrieval, and representation in the lexicon” (p. 532).

Although Swinney and Cutler’s data appear convincing, there is reason to

doubt their conclusion. In particular, the organization of Fraser’s (1970) fro-

zenness hierarchy may not necessarily be representative of most English spea-

kers’ mental lexicons. This seems especially likely since the hierarchy was

based solely upon Fraser’s own intuitions. We attempted in Experiment 1 to

empirically establish a frozenness continuum by asking subjects to judge whe-

ther idioms in various syntactic forms maintained their idiomatic interpreta-

tions. Following this, we went on in Experiments 2 and 3 to examine whether

there are any behavioral differences in processing and memory for idioms

depending on their degree of syntactic frozenness.

Experiment

Method

Subjects

Thirty-four undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz

participated as subjects to fulfill a course requirement. All the subjects were

native speakers of English.

Stimuli and design

Thirty-two verb particle idioms were chosen from Boatner, Gates and Makkai

(1975). These expressions were rated by 34 subjects as being equally familiar.


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Synt ax and i di oms 245

Table 1.

Example of di fferent t ransformat i ons and t hei r corresponding paraphr ases

i n Experi ment 1

Gerund Nominalization

Her father’s laying down the law prevented her from going to the dance.

Her father’s giving strict orders prevented her from going to the dance.

Adverb Insertion

The

boss will quickly lay down the law if anyone shows up late.

The boss will quickly give strict orders if anyone shows up late.

Part i cle M ovement

They will lay the law down if the party gets too wild.

They will give strict orders if the party gets too wild.

Passive

The

law will be laid down when Jane’s boyfriend finds out where she’s been.

Strict orders will be given when Jane’s boyfriend finds out where she’s been.

Act ion Nominal izat ion

The supervisor’s laying down the law was just what the staff needed.

The supervisor’s giving of strict orders was just what the staff needed.

All the idioms were syntactically manipulated according to the transforma-

tions in levels 1 through 5 (with 1 being most frozen) of Fraser’s (1970)

frozenness hierarchy: (1) gerund nominalization, (2) adverb insertion, (3)

particle movement, (4) passive, and (5) action nominalization.’ Verb particle

idioms were chosen in particular so that all five transformation operations

could be performed on each idiomatic expression. Each transformed idiom

was then presented in an appropriate sentential context and was paired with

a sentence that paraphrased its idiomatic meaning. The paraphrase for each

idiom was obtained from Boatner et al. (1975) to ensure both consistency and

conventionality of meaning. Table 1 presents an example of one idiom in

each of its five syntactic forms and the corresponding paraphrases. In total,

subjects saw 160 idiom-paraphrase pairs.

Procedure

Subjects were presented with a booklet containing a written set of instructions

and all the experimental material, which was randomly ordered. They were

‘The use of these syntactic transformations does not imply anything about their current status in linguistic

theory.


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246

R. W . Gibbs and G. P. Gonzal es

instructed to read each idiom-paraphrase pair and judge the degree to which

the first sentence was similar in meaning to the second. Subjects were asked

to make this judgment on a seven-point scale where 1 indicated that the two

sentences were not at all similar in meaning and 7 indicated that the sentences

were highly similar in meaning. The instructions emphasized that subjects

should not make the judgments according to what the first sentence might

mean if it were presented in a different form, but that all judgments should

be made according to the way the first sentence was actually presented.

Results and discussion

Subjects’ ratings of the idiom-paraphrase pairs reflect their intuitions about

the degree to which an idiom can be syntactically transformed and still retain

its idiomatic interpretation. High numerical ratings indicate that subjects vie-

wed a particular syntactic form as maintaining the idiomatic meaning, while

low ratings indicate that an idiom in some transformed state did not retain

its idiomatic meaning.

Two different analyses of subjects’ ratings were performed. The first ana-

lysis looked at subject’s mean ratings for the different syntactic forms collap-

sing across all the individual idiomatic expressions. The mean frozenness

ratings for the five transformations are presented in Table 2.

An analysis of variance on these data revealed a significant main effect of

transformation type, F(4, 124) =

11.04,

p <

0.0001. Further examination of

the individual means showed that subjects’ generally viewed idioms that have

undergone the Action Nominalization transformation (5 33) as more idioma-

tic than any other syntactic operation (p < 0.001) for all comparisons). Fraser

(1970) also saw idioms which could undergo Action Nominalization as being

the most flexible. Nonetheless, subjects’ ratings of the other syntactic forms

do not correspond in any regular way with Fraser’s frozenness hierarchy.

Table

2.

Frozemess razi ngs or di fferent synt acti c orms

Syntactic operation

Rating

Gerund Nominalization

Adverb Insertion

Particle Movement

Passive

Action Nominalization

4.75 (k 0.13)

4.22 (+ 0.20)

4.46 (-+ 0.26)

4.44 (k 0.15)

5.58 (+ 0.13)

Nole: Standard errors are shown in parentheses.


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Synt ax and idi oms

247

The second, and perhaps most important, analysis concerns subjects’ ra-

tings for each individual idiom. Subjects’ ratings for each idiom in its five

syntactic forms were averaged and these means are presented in Table 3.

As can be seen, the idioms vary in the extent to which they can undergo

different syntactic operations and still maintain their idiomatic meanings,

F(31, 1023) = 15.48,

p <

0.0001. Some expressions, such as

t ake under your

wing,

are seen as being very frozen in their syntactic form, while others, such

as

make up your mi nd,

are viewed as being more flexible in the kinds of

syntactic operations they may undergo,

Table 3.

I di oms and t hei r rated rozenness

Idiom

Rating

take under one’s wing

3.60

turn back the clock

3.75

cut down to size

3.80

put on some weight

3.84

sitting on pins and needles

4.05

wait on hand and foot

4.08

go against the grain

4.10

jump down one’s throat

4.14

breathe down one’s neck

4.21

pull up stakes

4.22

cry over spilled milk

4.23

let down one’s hair

4.38

throw up one’s hands

4.48

put on a good face

4.49

skating on thin ice

4.56

stew in one’s own juice

4.68

bark up the wrong tree

4.74

come apart at the seams 4.76

bring down the house

4.83

get away with murder

4.87

dance up a storm

4.92

bite off more than one can chew

4.95

throw in the sponge

5.00

beat around the bush

5.09

blow off some steam

5.17

put down one’s foot

5.21

wear out one’s welcome

5.42

keep up one’s end

5.66

lay down the law

5.70

roll out the red carpet 5.72

turn over a new leaf

5.59

make up one’s mind

6.u)


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248 R. W . Gi bbs and G. P. Gonzal es

One interesting idea, suggested by Cutler (1982), is that idioms which have

been in the language longer may be more frozen in their syntactic form. To

test this we computed a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient be-

tween the frozenness ratings and the earliest date an idiom is cited in the

Oxford English Dictionary (1933, and supplement). We were able to find

citations for 30 of the expressions used in Experiment 1 and found that r =

0.27,~ < 0.10 for exact citations, but a r = 0.38,~ < 0.025 when some variation

was allowed (e.g.,

“dance on thin ice” for “skating on thin ice”). This corre-

lation suggests that idioms which are least susceptible to syntactic transforma-

tions (i.e., more frozen) are also those which have existed longer in the

language.

Generally the results of Experiment 1 indicate that people are indeed

sensitive to the syntactic frozenness of idioms. The question remains as to

whether the degree of syntactic frozenness affects how people access and

process idiomatic expressions. This issue is addressed in Experiment 2.

Subjects in Experiment 2 were presented with phrases that either had

idiomatic meaning, like

sit t i ng on pi ns and needl es,

or nonidiomatic, literal

phrases, like

sew i ng w i t h pi ns and needl es.

The subjects’ task was to read

each visually presented word string and decide if it formed a meaningful

phrase in English. Half of the meaningful idiomatic phrases were expressions

that were rated in Experiment 1 as being more or less frozen in their syntactic

form, and the other half were idioms that were more or less flexible in their

syntactic form. We hypothesized that idioms are

not

represented with equal

status in the lexicon and that frozen idioms should be more lexicalized than

flexible idiomatic expressions. Consequently, our prediction was that subjects

should be much faster at making the phrase classification responses for frozen

idioms than they would be for idioms that are more flexible in their syntactic

form. In addition, we also expected to replicate the Swinney and Cutler

(1979) finding that idiomatic expressions can be processed faster than noni-

diomatic control strings. This result would confirm the hypothesis that people

need not analyze the literal meanings of idioms before determining their

nonliteral, idiomatic interpretations (see Gibbs, 1980, 1985).

Experiment 2

Method

Subj ects

Forty-two undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz par-

ticipated in the experiment in order to fulfill a course requirement.


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Synt ax and idi oms

249

Mater ials

The

experimental materials consisted of twenty idiomatic words strings. Ten

of the idiomatic word strings were the most frozen expressions from Experi-

ment 1, and the remainder were the ten most flexible idioms as determined

by subjects’ ratings in Experiment 1. These were matched with twenty noni-

diomatic, control strings. The control strings were constructed by replacing

the first two words in each idiomatic string with words of relatively equal

length (in both letters and syllables). Each control string formed a literal,

grammatically acceptable English phrase. Overall, the frozen idioms were on

average 21.7 characters in length, while the control strings for these frozen

idioms were 19.7 characters. The flexible idioms were 20.4 characters long

and the controls for the flexible idioms were 19.6 characters in length. These

means did not differ significantly from each other as determined by an analy-

sis of variance. Therefore, differences in response times to the experimental

stimuli could not be attributed to the length of the word strings.

In addition, 20 word strings that did not form an acceptable English phrase

(i.e.,

“no sleep it floor out”;

“wish out the table to”) were created. These

unacceptable word strings were roughly equivalent to the acceptable phrase

strings in number of words and characters. Subjects were expected to respond

“No” (“Not meaningful”) to these targets, The data for these word strings

were not included in the data analysis.

esign

Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two groups, each of which was

the complement of the other. If a given idiomatic phrase was presented to

one group, the corresponding nonidiomatic, control string was shown to the

other group. Each group of targets contained 6 practice phrases, 20 filler

phrases, and 20 experimental targets. Half of the experimental targets were

idiomatic phrases and half were nonidiomatic word strings. In each group, 5

of the idiomatic phrases were frozen and 5 were flexible in their syntactic

form, as determined by the ratings in Experiment 1.

Procedure

Subjects were tested individually. The 40 word strings were randomly presen-

ted in lower-case letters on a CRT display screen under the control of an

IBM personal computer, which recorded all response latencies. Subjects were

instructed to read each word string and decide, as quickly as possible, whether

or not each of these formed a meaningful phrase in English. All subjects were

instructed to indicate their decision by pressing one of two buttons on a


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250

R. W . Gi bbs and G. P. Gonzal es

keyboard which was in front of them. Once the response to the target had

been made, there was a 2-second delay and the next word string appeared

on the screen. Six practice phrases were then given followed by the 40 expe-

rimental stimuli. Response latencies were measured from the onset of the

word string to when the subject pressed one of the two buttons,


Response times longer than 5 seconds (less than 1% of all responses) were

counted as errors and eliminated from the analysis. These outliers represen-

ted cases in which experimental instructions could not have been followed,

as when subjects’ attention wandered from the task. The response times to

make the phrase classification judgments and the proportion of errors are

presented in Table 4. Only responses in which subjects made a correct respon-

se were included in the analysis. Error rates were also tallied for each subject

in the experiment. The overall rates were nearly identical for the four expe-

rimental conditions (6.75%), and consequently will not be discussed further.

A two-way analysis of variance was performed with Frozenness (frozen vs.

flexible) and Sentence Type (idiom vs. control) as within-subject factors.

Each of the analyses were performed twice: once treating subjects as a ran-

dom factor while collapsing over material (FI), and once treating materials

as the random factor while collapsing over subjects (F2). Min F statistics are

also reported as suggested by Clark (1973).

These analyses revealed a significant effect of Sentence Type (idioms vs.

control strings), [FI(l, 41) = 17.17, p < 0.001; K?(l, 19) = 9.45, p < 0.001;

min F’(1, 62) = 6.09, p < 0.0251, and a significant interaction between Fro-

zenness (frozen vs. flexible) and Sentence Type [FI(l, 41) = 7.59, p < 0.01;

F2(1, 19) = 4.21,

p <

0.05; min F’(1, 61) = 2.72,

p <

0.101. Further analysis

on the individual means indicated that subjects were much faster at respond-

Table

4.

M ean lat encies (mi l l iseconds) t o di oms and control str i ngs

Sentence type

Frozenness level

Idioms Control strings

Frozen

Flexible

1115 (k 46) 1333 (+ 73)

1240 (+ 49) 1291(+- 55)

Note: standard errors are shown in parentheses.


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Syntax and idioms

251

ing to the frozen idioms (1115 ms) than to the matched control strings (1333

ms), t(82) = 2.54, p < 0.01. Moreover, subjects were also faster at responding

to the frozen idioms (1115 ms) than to the flexible ones (1239 ms), t(82) =

1.86,

p < 0.05.

All other differences were not statistically reliable.

The finding that subjects were faster in responding to the idiomatic expres-

sions than to the control strings replicates Swinney and Cutler’s (1979) results

and is consistent with Gibbs’s (1980, 1985) data that idioms are com-

prehended faster than literal uses of the same expressions. As such these

results confirm the hypothesis that people need not analyze the literal mean-

ings of idiomatic expressions before deriving their nonliteral, idiomatic in-

terpretations.2 It appears unlikely, then, that idioms are represented in a

special, separate idiom dictionary (see BobTow and Bell, 1973; Weinreich,

1969), which is consulted after a literal analysis of the expression was found

to be defective.

One could argue, however, that the idiom-control string differences are

due to subjects being in a special “idiom processing mode” since they were

presented with many idioms in the experiment. To check for this, we ran-

domly matched subjects from the two experimental groups and analyzed the

response times for the first occurrence of an idiom in one group, with its

matched control in the other group. This analysis showed that subjects were

faster overall in responding to the first idiom (1105 ms) than they were in

responding to the matched control strings (1273 ms), 41) = 1.96,

p <

0.05.

Thus, even before subjects could be put into an “idiom mode of processing”

there was a reaction time advantage for the idiom phrases over the control

strings. A similar finding is reported by Swinney and Cutler (1979).

One other possible interpretation of the results merits consideration. The

advantage shown by frozen idioms in this experiment may be simply due to

there being a higher likelihood of occurrence for the sequence of lexical items

forming these expressions than for those items forming the flexible idioms.

In some sense, this notion of transitional probability fits in well with our

hypothesis that idioms which are restricted in the kinds of syntactic operations

they may undergo are more predictable than are idioms which are syntacti-

cally flexible. However, it seems necessary to further examine the idea that

predictability alone might account for the faster processing of frozen idioms,

as well as the general advantage of idioms over the nonidiomatic controls.

To test this idea, we ran a control study similar to one suggested by Swin-

ney and Cutler (1979, see experiment 1). Sixteen undergraduates from the

University of California, Santa Cruz were presented with a typed list of all

*See Gibbs (1985) for the results of two studies which suggest that people do not always analyze the literal

meanings of idioms in parallel to determining their nonliteral, idiomatic interpretations.


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the idioms and nonidiomatic phrases, each with its final two words omitted.

These materials were randomly intermixed with 80 “filler” nonidiomatic

phrases, which were roughly similar in length to the experimental materials.

The purpose of these “filler” items was to decrease the possibility of subjects

noticing that all of the experimental materials could be idioms. Subjects were

asked to write down the first word or words that came to mind to complete

each phrase. The number of completion responses that were identical to

either the different idioms or the control materials were tabulated. These

data showed that subjects were

not

any better at completing frozen idioms

(38%) than they were at completing flexible idioms (43%), F(1, 15) = 0.043,

p < 0.10. This suggests that the transitional probability per se for the frozen

idioms was not making subjects respond faster to these expressions than to

the flexible idioms. An analysis of the idiom/control pairs revealed that the

number of completion responses was higher for the idioms than for the con-

trol phrases in 15 out of the 20 total pairs. For one pair there were equal

number of completion responses to the idiom and its control phrase, and 4

control phrases were completed more often than their corresponding idioms.

For purposes of comparison, the data were divided in two unequal groups.

One group comprised the 15 idiom/control pairs which had the idiom comple-

tion advantage over their respective controls. The other group comprised the

1 idiom/control pair that had equal number of completion responses to the

idiom and its control phrase, and the 4 control phrases that were completed

more often than their corresponding idioms. The main reaction time data for

each of these conditions can be seen in Table 5.

An analysis of variance was performed on the reaction-time data with

Phrase Type and Response Completion Category as the independent vari-

ables. The main effect of Phrase Type was not significant, F(1, 18) = 0.03,

Table 5. Mean latencies

(mil l i seconds) t o di om and cont rol phrases as a

function f

response completion category

Response completion category

Phrase type

Control advantage*

Idiom advantage**

over idiom + no idiom/

over control

control difference

Idiom

Control

-

*@I = 5).

**+I = 15).

1208

1182

1271

1309


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Synt ax and di oms

253

p >

0.10; while the effect of Response Completion Category was highly

reliable, F(1,18) = 21.93,

p <

0.001. Nonetheless, the crucial interaction

between these two factors was not significant, F(1, 18) = 1.42,

p >

0.10. As

such, these data demonstrate that transitional probability does not play a

significant role in the effects reported in the present study.

The most important result of Experiment 2 is that subjects process frozen

idioms faster than they do flexible ones. This suggests that idioms are not

unified with respect to access, retrieval, and representation in the lexicon.

People appear to be sensitive to the linguistic frozenness of an idiomatic

expression and this affects the speed with which they are understood. In

Experiment 3 we examined whether linguistic frozenness had any effect on

memory for idioms.

Subjects listened to a tape recording of a series of stories, some of which

ended in idiomatic expressions. If an idiom’s syntactic productivity influences

the speed with which it is processed, then idioms that take longer to under-

stand should be more memorable than those that were comprehended

quickly. This additional processing time reflects the difficulty subjects have

in accessing flexible expressions, which should make these idioms more dis-

tinctive in memory and consequently should be recalled more often.

Experiment 3

Method

Subj ects

Thirty-six undergraduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz

served as subjects in order to fulfill a course requirement.

M at eri al s and desi gn

The

experiment employed a cued-recall paradigm. For the acquisition part

of the experiment, subjects listened to a tape recording ,of 40 stories, 20 of

which ended in idiomatic expressions and 20 of which ended in nonidiomatic

utterances. Half of the idiom stories ended in frozen idioms and half in

flexible ones. These expressions were identical to those used in the previous

study. Table 6 presents examples of stories ending irra frozen idiom, a flexible

idiom, and a nonidiomatic utterance.

rating

study was performed to ensure that the last lines of these stories

were interpreted as they were intended to be. Twelve subjects participated

in the study. Subjects read each story and made a judgment as to whether


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Table 6.

Exampl es of stor i es used in Experi ment 3

Frozen idiom

Jerry loved to ski. He was pretty good so he entered a big skiing contest one day. When it was

his turn, he tried to go too fast and fell down and lost the race. Jerry later moaned to a friend,

“I wish I could turn back the clock.”

Flexible idiom

Erica’s father did not like the idea of his 15-year old daughter dating. One month Erica actually

went out every weekend with a different boy. Finally, Erica’s father had had enough. He said

to her, “I’m going to put down my foot.”

No

id iom

Mike had just bought himself a new car. His parents and friends warned him to drive carefully,

but Mike just ignored them. One day, he had an accident and destroyed the car. He cried to

a friend, “Now what am I going to do?”

each final sentence was idiomatic or literal in its context. They also rated, on

a six point scale, how well the final sentence of each story fit into the context.

Results showed that subjects rated the frozen idioms as being idiomatic 98%

of the time, and the flexible idioms as being idiomatic 96% of the time. The

nonidiomatic targets were rated as being literal 100% of the time. An analysis

of the ratings indicated that there was no significant difference between the

overall effectiveness of frozen idiom, flexible idiom, and nonidiomatic stories

in inducing the meanings of their last lines. These results suggest that there

are no differences in the story contexts that would bias either understanding

or memory for the target sentences.

In the acquisition part of the study, subjects heard the 40 stories presented

in a random order. In addition to these contexts, there was one filler story

at the beginning of the tape and one at the end. These were included to

prevent primacy and recency effects from occurring in the subsequent recall

test. For the recall phase of the experiment, subjects were given a list of 20

cues, each of which was related to the setting of a story ending with an

idiomatic expression. For the 2 idiom stories presented in Table 6, for exam-

ple, subjects were given the cue

skiing

for the frozen context, and

dating

for

the flexible story. Since memory for the nonidiomatic utterances was not of

interest, there were no recall cues for these stories.

Procedure

Subjects were run in groups of six. They were instructed to pay close attention

to the materials presented because they would be asked some questions about


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Synt ax and idi oms

255

them afterwards. The tape containing the stories was then played to the

subjects. Following this, subjects read some unrelated stories for approxi-

mately 15 minutes. Immediately afterwards, subjects were given an answer

sheet containing the 20 recall cues. They were asked to look at the cues and

write down the final sentence of the story that corresponded with the cue.

They were given 15 minutes to complete the memory task.


A sentence was scored as being correct if it contained all the important

content words and had the same syntactic structure as the target sentence.

Subjects recalled more instances of flexible idioms (46%, se = 0.03) than

they did frozen idioms (32%, se

= 0.03) [FI(l, 35) = 23.06,

p <

0.0001;

F2(1, 19) = 4.83,

p < 0.05;

min F’(1, 49) = 4.51,

p <

0.051. These results

support the hypothesis that flexible idioms are more memorable than frozen

expressions because of the difficulty subjects have in retrieving flexible idioms

from the mental lexicon. This additional processing makes these expressions

more distinctive and consequently people remember them better.

One could argue that the memory superiority for the flexible idioms is due

to their being more closely related in meaning to their nonidiomatic, literal

interpretations. Thus, subjects process both the literal and idiomatic mean-

ings of flexible idioms, but not so for frozen ones, which results in these

expressions being more distinctive and memorable. This hypothesis seems

unlikely given the results of Experiment 2 where subjects took less time,

although not significantly so, to process flexible idioms than their nonidioma-

tic control strings. This indicates that people are not processing the literal

meanings of these expressions before going on to determine their idiomatic

meanings. Moreover, the results of Gibbs (1985) suggest that people do not

necessarily process the literal meanings of idioms at any point during com-

prehension. These findings cast doubt on any explanation of the present

results that the memory superiority for flexible idioms is due to their idiomatic

and nonidiomatic meanings being interpreted. Rather, the data appear to be

due to the difficulty subjects have in accessing flexible idioms from the mental

lexicon.

General discussion

Much of the interest in idiomatic expressions derives from the fact that they

are not amenable to traditional compositional analysis and because idioms


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differ widely in terms of their syntactic productivity. Linguists have been

particularly concerned with idioms since one argument for the existence of

transformations presumes that certain idioms can appear in more than one

syntactic form (cf. Culicover, 1982; Perlmutter and Soames, 1979), although

more recent proposals have tried to argue for the direct generation of surface

structures (see Bresnan, 1982). Despite this interest on the part of linguists,

little work in psychology has been devoted to the role of syntactic frozenness

in people’s intuitions about different idioms and how these idioms are proces-

sed and remembered.

The results of the present studies indicate that the degree of syntactic

frozenness of an idiom does indeed affect peoples’ behavior in understanding

and remembering these expressions. In Experiment 1 we found that people

view some idioms as retaining their idiomatic interpretations regardless of

their syntactic forms, while other idioms appear to be quite restricted in the

forms they can take. Experiment 2 demonstrated that people process frozen

idioms faster than they do flexible ones. Moreover, idiomatic expressions

were processed more quickly than nonidiomatic, control strings. As Experi-

ment 3 showed, the differential speed with which idioms are processed sub-

sequently affects their memorability. Idioms that are more flexible and take

longer to process are generally recalled more often than are frozen expres-

sions. This is so because it is more difficult for subjects to process flexible

idioms, which makes these expressions more distinctive and memorable.

These findings support the idea that idioms are part of the normal lexicon,

but are represented differentially depending on their degree of syntactic fro-

zenness. Frozen idioms appear to be more lexicalized than flexible ones and

consequently can be accessed faster from the mental lexicon. This makes

good sense since the representation of expressions, such as

kick the bucket

does not need to take into account other possible syntactic forms. Other

phrases, like

lay down the law

can be viewed as idiomatic in a variety of

forms, and are not as strong in their lexical status as more frozen expressions.

This conclusion poses a question as to how idioms are represented in the

lexicon. Specifically, what would a model of the lexicon look like that incor-

porated different degrees of representation for idioms which vary in their

syntactic frozenness? One possibility is that idioms have respresentations for

each of their permissible syntactic forms. Whereas frozen idioms, such as

turn

back the clock

have a limited number of entries, flexible idioms, such as

lay

down the law

have multiple entries corresponding to each of their syntactic

constructions. Although frozen and flexible idioms examined in the present

studies were viewed as equally familiar to subjects; it is likely that the pro-

cessing-time advantage for frozen idioms is a. result of people’s familiarity

with these expressions’

particular

syntactic forms. For example, people may


15/17

Synt ax and i dioms

257

be just as familiar with a frozen expression, like turn back

t he clock

as they

are with flexible idioms, such as lay down

the law

when these phrases are

seen in all of there different permissible forms. However, because frozen

idioms are seen in fewer syntactic forms, each individual construction will be

viewed as more familiar. Consequently, subjects may be more familiar with

the specific syntactic construction

turn

back t he clock

than they are with the

particular construction

lay dow n the aw .

This may be so despite the findings

in Experiment 2 that subjects were equally good at completing the endings

of frozen and flexible idioms. After all, the lack of a significant difference in

the number of successful completions for the two types of idioms does

not

mean that there are no differences in the speed with which people retrieve

these different kinds of idioms from the mental lexicon.

One way of incorporating these different representations for idioms is to

assume that the internal lexicon can be characterized as a

t hreshold model .

This model suggests that idioms can be viewed as different logogens (cf.

Morton, 1969, 1979), each with different threshold levels depending on the

frequency of their specific syntactic constructions. Frozen idioms would have

lower resting thresholds than flexible idioms and less information would be

required from the input stimulus to bring the logogen for a frozen idiom to

its threshold level. Consequently, people will process these expressions faster

as shown in Experiment 2.

Another way of incorporating different degrees of representation for

idioms is to assume a

search model

(cf. Becker, 1979; Forster, 1979). In this

model, lexical access is a process by which an input stimulus is matched to

the representation of a word or phrase in the lexicon. Partial analysis of a

stimulus results in the generation of a set of candidates, which is then searched

serially until a match with the stimulus is found. The set of candidates

is typically held to be searched in order of frequency of occurrence of the

item represented (cf. Forster, 1979). If idioms have multiple entries, it would

be expected that the entries for the most frequent syntactic forms would be

found first from the search. In this way, idioms with restricted syntactic forms,

which are most frequent, would be recognized faster than idioms that could

be seen in a variety of syntactic forms.

This discussion is based on the reasonable assumption that retrieving

idioms from the lexicon operates in a similar manner to normal lexical access

processes. The application of both the

threshold

and

search models

to the

representation of idioms in the mental lexicon is somewhat speculative. Both

models, however, appear equally capable of accounting for the processing-

time differences found between frozen and flexible idioms. One other possi-

bility is that people do not have multiple representations for each of the permis-

sible syntactic forms an idiom can take. Instead, people may have abstract


16/17

258 R. W. Gibbs and G. P. Gonzales

knowledge about the possible syntactic operations that can be applied to any

particular idiom. This idea has some intuitive appeal given that most idioms

are derived from novel, metaphorical expressions which presumably are not

represented as phrasal units in the mental lexicon. When the process of

idio-

matizution

(cf. Chafe, 1970) occurs and an expression becomes more lexicali-

zed, there must be some constraints on what possible syntactic forms the

idiom can take.

This brings us to an important question left unanswered. What it is about

idioms that makes some of them syntactically frozen and others flexible?

Although many formal syntactic devices have been offered to account for the

syntactic deficiencies of idioms (see Dong, 1971; Fraser, 1970; Katz, 1973;

Newmeyer, 1974; Weinrich, 1969), there is good reason to believe that the

limited productivity of idioms must be due to the relation between syntax,

semantics, and pragmatics (Nunberg, 1978; Strassler, 1982). Some recent

proposals have even suggested that idioms should be treated as analyzable

strings with the meanings of individual lexical items contributing both to their

overall idiomatic meanings and their syntactic limitations (Nunberg, 1978;

Wasow, Sag and Nunberg, 1982). Psycholinguistic studies have shown that

people do not ordinarily compute the complete literal meaning of an idiom

during comprehension. Nonetheless, people may still have some knowledge

of the internal semantics of idioms which constrains the possible syntactic

forms these expressions may take. This could be accomplished by the momen-

tary examination of an idiom’s individual lexical items (Estill and Kemper,

1981; Swinney, 1981). Exactly how an idiom is represented in the mental

lexicon will depend on further investigations of the semantic relationships

among its parts and how people’s acceptance and understanding of idioms is

affected by their internal structures.

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On examine, au tours de trois experiences, l’effet du “gel” syntaxique sur la comprehension et la m6morisation

des expressions idiomatiques. Dans l’exp6rience 1) on Btabli un continuum de gel en demandant aux sujets

de juger si les expressions idiomatiques maintiennent leurs sens idiomatique dans des formes syntaxiques

differentes. Les resultats de la seconde experience indiquent que les sujets traitent les expressions idiomatiques

plus rapidement que des suites controles non idiomatiques. En outre les sujets sont plus rapides pour calculer

ies expressions idiomatiques, gelCes qu’ils ne Ie sont pour comprendre Ies expressions idiomatiques flexibles.

La demihre experience montre que le degre de gel syntaxique a un effet sur Ia memorisation des expressions

idiomatiques. On se souvient plus des expressions idiomatiques flexibles que de celles qui sont geldes. Ces

donn6es appuient I’idCe que les expressions idiomatiques font partie du lexique normal mais qu’on acci?de de

fa9on diff&ente selon leur degre de gel syntaxique.

Documents

Gibbs, Syntactic Frozenness in Processing and Remembering Idioms