An idiom 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. 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.
Examples The following sentences contain idioms. The
fixed words constituting the idiom in each case are bolded:
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 keep an eye out for something means to maintain
awareness of it.
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.
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. – rocket science means something is difficult. Figuratively,
not rocket science means not difficult.
j. Put a cork in it. - put a cork in it is an extremely impolite, informal way to say,
shut up, 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 if they refer to a universal truth.
k. The devil is in the details.
l. The early bird catches the worm.
m. Break a leg.
n. Waste not, want not.
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 scrutiny, complexities 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
In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the
principle of compositionality. 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. John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated
words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term. 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. Translating idioms
Literal translation of opaque idioms will not convey the same meaning in other languages.
Idioms from other languages that are analogous to kick the bucket in English are listed next:
Arabic: Wad'aa" he said goodbye Afrikaans: lepel deur die dak steek 'to push
a spoon through the ceiling', Bulgarian: да ритнеш камбаната
'to kick the bell' Czech: natáhnout bačkory 'pull the slippers'
Danish: at stille træskoene 'to take off the clogs',
Dutch: het loodje leggen 'to lay the piece of lead' or de pijp aan Maarten geven 'to
give the pipe to Maarten', Finnish: potkaista tyhjää 'to kick the void'
or heittää veivinsä 'to toss away the crank' or kasvaa koiranputkea 'to be growing cow
parsley' or heittää lusikan nurkkaan 'to toss the spoon to the corner' or oikaista
koipensa 'to stretch the shanks' French: manger des pissenlits par la racine
'to eat dandelions by the root' or casser sa pipe 'to break his pipe' or passer l'arme
à gauche 'pass the weapon to the left', German: den Löffel abgeben 'to give the spoon
away' or ins Gras beißen 'to bite into the grass' or sich die Radieschen von unten ansehen
'look at the radishes from underneath', Hungarian: Feldobja a lábát 'to throw his
foot up' or Fűbe harap 'to bite into the grass' or Alulról szagolja az ibolyát 'to
smell the viola from underneath' or Elpatkolt 'to fail shoeing',
Greek: τινάζω τα πέταλα 'to shake the horse-shoes',
Italian: tirare le cuoia 'to pull the skins', Latvian: nolikt karoti 'to put the spoon down'
Lithuanian: pakratyti kojas 'to shake the legs',
Norwegian: å parkere tøflene 'to park the slippers',
Polish: kopnąć w kalendarz 'to kick the calendar', wyciągnąć kopyta 'to stretch
the hooves' Portuguese: bater as botas 'to beat the boots',
esticar o pernil 'to stretch the leg', or fazer tijolo 'to make a brick', plus comer
capim pela raiz 'to eat grass by the root', abotoar o paletó 'to button up the blazer/coat',
esticar as canelas 'to stretch the shanks', Romanian: a da colțul 'to turn the corner',
or i-a sunat ceasul 'his clock has rung', Russian: сыграть в ящик 'to play
into the box', дать дуба 'to give the oak', откинуть копыта 'to
throw back the hoofs' Spanish: estirar la pata 'to pass away',
Swedish: trilla av pinnen 'to fall off the stick', ta ner skylten 'take the sign down'
or sätta skorna 'take the shoes off' Tlingit: dákde kákw aawayaa 'to take one’s
basket into the woods', Ukrainian: врізати дуба 'to cut
the oak', Hindi: Patta kat jana 'to cut the leaf'
Urdu: Haathi nikal gaya dum phans gaya ہاتھی نکل گیا دم پھنس گئی 'The elephant
escaped but his tail got stuck'
Some idioms are transparent. Much of their meaning does get through if they are taken
literally. For example, lay one's cards on the table meaning to reveal previously unknown
intentions, or to reveal a secret. Transparency is a matter of degree; spill the beans and
leave no stone unturned are not entirely literally interpretable, but only involve a slight metaphorical
broadening. Another category of idioms is a word having several meanings, sometimes
simultaneously, sometimes discerned from the context of its usage. This is seen in the
English language in polysemes, the common use of the same word for an activity, for
those engaged in it, for the product used, for the place or time of an activity, and
sometimes for a verb. Idioms tend to confuse those unfamiliar with
them; students of a new language must learn its idiomatic expressions as vocabulary. Many
natural language words have idiomatic origins, but are assimilated, so losing their figurative
senses, for example, in Portuguese, the expression saber de coração 'to know by heart', with
the same meaning as in English, was shortened to 'saber de cor', and, later, to the verb
decorar, meaning memorize. 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 do not form a constituent in any theory's analysis of
syntactic structure because the object of the preposition is not part 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. 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. Any word or any combination of words that are linked
together by dependencies qualifies as a catena. 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:
The fixed words of the idiom in each case are linked together by dependencies; they
form a catena. The material that is outside of the idiom is not part of the idiom. The
following two trees illustrate proverbs:
The fixed words of the proverbs again form a catena each time. The adjective nitty-gritty
and the adverb always are not part of the respective proverb and their appearance does
not interrupt the fixed words of the proverb. A caveat concerning the catena-based analysis
of idioms concerns their status in the lexicon. Idioms are lexical items, which means they
are stored as catenae in the lexicon. In the actual syntax, however, some idioms can be
broken up by various functional constructions. The catena-based analysis of idioms provides
a basis for an understanding of meaning compositionality. The Principle of Compositionality can in fact
be maintained. Units of meaning are being assigned to catenae, whereby many of these
catenae are not constituents. See also
Notes
References
External links Idioms.in - Online English idioms dictionary.