IDIOMS

What is idiom

Idiom is an expression with a meaning that can not be guessed from the meanings of

the individual word.

IDIOMS A particular meaning will be expressed by a single word or by a sequence of words.

E.g English PUNCH and KICK have to be translated into French with donner un coup de poing and donner un coup de pied.

IDIOMS

Idioms involve collocation of special kind.

Eg kick the bucket, fly of the handle, spill the beans.

IDIOMS An idiom is semantically like a single word it does not function like one.

Kick the bucketed Kicked the bucket

IDIOMS A large number of idioms

contain a verb and a noun but although the verb may be placed in the past tense.

The number of noun can never be changed.

Spilled the beans but not spill the bean.

IDIOMS The noun may be plural but the adjective can not be comparative.

Red herrings but not redder herring

IDIOMS There are plenty of syntactic

restriction Some idioms have passives but

others do not. The law was laid down and The

beans have been spilled are all right

The bucket was kicked is not

IDIOMS The restrictions very from idioms to idioms . Some are more restricted than others.

TYPES OF IDIOMS A very common type of idiom in english is the phrasal verb which is the combinitation of verb and adverb of the kind make up, give in put down .

TYPES OF IDIOMS The meanings of these

combinations can not be predicted from the individual verb and adverb in many cases there is a single verb with the same or close meaning

invent, quell.

TYPES OF IDIOMS There are two types of idioms. (i) phrasal verb (i) partial idioms Phrasal verb is the combination of verb

and adverb. make up, give in put down

Put down has a literal sense too and there are many others that are both idiomatic and not. E.g

Take inThe conjurer took the audience in. The

woman took the homeless children in.

Second point is the sequence of verb plus preposition.

E.g look after, go for

3rd point of phrasal verb is the sequence of verb, adverb and preposition.

Such as put up with (tolerate) do away with (kill)

Second type of idioms is partial idioms. In partial idioms one of the word has its

usual meaning the other has a meaning that is peculiar to the particular sequence

E.g red hair

White in white coffee, white wine and white people is idiomatic depends on whether or not we defined the terms as , with a lightest of the colors normally associated with the entity

What is and what is not an idiom is often a matter of degree.

We could perhaps define idioms in term of non-equivalence in other languages.

E.g kick the bucket , red herringThe word ‘nurse’ in French is ‘grade-

malade; but this can not be directly translated into english it is quite transparent.

PROBLEMS OF IDIOMS The problem of idiom is involved

with the much wider issue of word formation by which what would appear to be new and more complex lexemes can be formed from simpler ones.

For examples at one extreme we have expression such as public house means inn.

PROBLEMS OF IDIOMS This is not a total idiom like red herring,

since the meaning can in part be related to public and house, but one could certainly not predict from the words themselves the existence of the compound.

Then there are words such as blackbird and greenhouse which are similarly formed from other words, also without the possibility of predicting that they could be formed with their particular meaning.

But the distinction between what is one word and what is two is not wholly clear.

Finally there are the derivatives , words formed by the use of suffixes, which differs from the grammatical formation in that are not regular either information or semantics.

We can contrast boy / boysh with purly grammatical boy/ boys.

We can not predict that a form will exist a certain meaning for though we have boyish, girlish, etc there is no dogish or catish.

We find a contrast meaning associated with any one.

Chomsky notes that readable is more restricted in meaning than ‘able to read’ and there are other restrictions with other words ending in able e.g

Commendable, abominable