Phraseological
units are habitually defined as non-motivated word-groups that cannot
be freely made up in speech but are reproduced as ready-made units.
This definition proceeds from the assumption that the essential
features of phraseological units are stability of the lexical
components and lack of motivation.1 It is consequently assumed that
unlike components of free word-groups which may vary according to the
needs of communication, member-words of phraseological units are
always reproduced as single unchangeable collocations.
Thus,
for example, the constituent red in
the free word-group red
flower may,
if necessary, be substituted for by any other adjective denoting
colour (blue,
white,
etc.), without essentially changing the denotational meaning of the
word-group under discussion (a flower of a certain colour). In the
phraseological unitred
tape (bureaucratic
“methods) no such substitution is possible, as a change of the
adjective would involve a complete change in the meaning of the whole
group. A blue (black,
white,
etc.) tape would mean ‘a tape of a certain colour’. It follows
that the phraseological unit red
tape is
semantically non-motivated, i.e. its meaning cannot be deduced from
the meaning of its components and that it exists as a ready-made
linguistic unit which does not allow of any variability of its
lexical components. It is also argued that non-variability of the
phraseological unit is not confined to its lexical components.
Grammatical structure of phraseological units is to a certain extent
also stable. Thus, though the structural formula of the
word-groups red
flower and red
tape is
identical (A
+ +N),
the noun flower may
be used in the plural (red
flowers),
whereas no such change is possible in the phraseological unit red
tape; red
tapes would
then denote ‘tapes of red colour’ but not ‘bureaucratic
methods’. This is also true of other types of phraseological units,
e.g. what
will Mrs. Grundy say?,
where the verbal component is invariably reproduced in the same
grammatical form.
The criterion of idiomaticity
The
definition is felt to be inadequate as the concept ready-made
units seems
to be rather vague. In fact this term can be applied to a variety of
heterogeneous linguistic phenomena ranging from word-groups to
sentences (e.g. proverbs, sayings) and also quotations from poems,
novels or scientific treatises all of which can be described as
ready-made units.
Frequent
discussions have also led to questioning this approach to phraseology
from a purely semantic point of view as the
criterion of idiomaticity is
found to be an inadequate guide in singling out phraseological units
from other word-groups. Borderline cases between idiomatic and
non-idiomatic word-groups are so numerous and confusing that the
final decision seems to depend largely on one’s “feeling of the
language». This can be proved by the fact that the same
word-groups are treated by some linguists as idiomatic phrases and by
others as free word-groups. For example, such word-groups as take
the chair —
‘preside at a meeting’, take
one’s chance —
‘trust to luck or fortune’, take
trouble (to
do smth) — ‘to make efforts’ and others are marked in some of
the English dictionaries as idioms or phrases, whereas in others they
are found as free word-groups illustrating one of the meanings of the
verb to take or the nouns combined with this verb.
The
term idiomaticity is
also regarded by some linguists as requiring clarification. As a
matter of fact this term is habitually used to denote lack of
motivation from the point of view of one’s mother tongue. A
word-group which defies word by word translation is consequently
described as idiomatic. It follows that if idiomaticity is viewed as
the main distinguishing feature of phraseological units, the same
word-groups in the English language may be classified as idiomatic
phraseological units by Russian speakers and as non-idiomatic
word-groups by those whose mother tongue contains analogous
collocations. Thus, e.g., from the point of view of Russian speakers
such word-groups as take
tea, take care,
etc. are often referred to phraseology as the Russian translation
equivalents of these word-groups (пить
чай,
заботиться)
do not contain the habitual translation equivalents of the verb take.
French speakers, however, are not likely to find anything idiomatic
about these word-groups as there are similar lexical units in the
French language.
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(Redirected from Idiomatic)
This article is about language structure. For words with a figurative meaning, see Idiom. For other uses, see Idiom (disambiguation).
Idiom, also called idiomaticness or idiomaticity, is the syntactical, grammatical, or structural form peculiar to a language.[1] Idiom is the realized structure of a language, as opposed to possible but unrealized structures that could have developed to serve the same semantic functions but did not.
The grammar of a language (its morphology, phonology, and syntax) is inherently arbitrary and peculiar to a specific language (or group of related languages). For example, although in English it is idiomatic (accepted as structurally correct) to say «cats are associated with agility», other forms could have developed, such as «cats associate toward agility» or «cats are associated of agility».[2] Unidiomatic constructions sound wrong to fluent speakers, although they are often entirely comprehensible. For example, the title of the classic book English as She Is Spoke is easy to understand (its idiomatic counterpart is English as It Is Spoken), but it deviates from English idiom in the gender of the pronoun and the inflection of the verb. Lexical gaps are another key example of idiom.
Emic and etic viewsEdit
Monolingual native speakers in an insulated monolingual-native environment are mostly not conscious of idiomaticness (the quality or state of a construction matching the idiom of the given language), because in general their minds never reach for, or hear, other possible structures. The main exception is when they hear the natural experimentation of children acquiring the language, when they may encounter, for example, overregularization (for example, I seed two deers for I saw two deer). By this correlation, solecism to native-speaking monolingual minds often sounds childish. However, when adults study a foreign language, they become consciously aware of idiomaticness and the lack of it. For example, in English it is idiomatic to use an indefinite article when describing a person’s occupation (I am a plumber; she is an engineer), but in Spanish and many other languages it is not (soy plomero; ella es ingeniera), and a native speaker of English learning Spanish must encounter and accept that fact to become fluent.
The count sense of the word idiom, referring to a saying with a figurative meaning, is related to the present sense of the word by the arbitrariness and peculiarity aspects; the idiom «she is pulling my leg» (meaning «she is humorously misleading me») is idiomatic because it belongs, by convention, to the language, whether or not anyone can identify the original logic by which it was coined (arbitrariness), and regardless of whether it translates literally to any other language (peculiarity).
See alsoEdit
- Bahuvrihi
- Collocation
- Cliché
- Phraseme
- Programming idiom
ReferencesEdit
- ^ Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, archived from the original on 2020-10-10, retrieved 2014-07-13.
- ^ Garner, Bryan A. (2016), Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.), headword «accompanied», ISBN 978-0190491482,
Idiom requires accompanied by, not *accompanied with—e.g.: ‘[…] sliced in half and accompanied with [read accompanied by] no more than a small scoop of ice cream.’