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Idioms

Idioms - раздел Лингвистика, Idioms. Idioms Involve Collocation Of A Special Kind. Consider, For Instance...

Idioms. Idioms involve collocation of a special kind. Consider, for instance, kickthe bucket, fly off the handle, spill the beans, red herring.For here wenot only have the collocation of kick and the bucket, but alsothe fact that the meaning of the resultant combination is opaque - it is notrelated to the meaning of the individual words, but is sometimes though notalways nearer to the meaning of a single word thus kick the bucket equalsdie .Even where an idiom is semantically like a single word it does notfunction like one. Thus we will not have a past tense kick-the-bucketed.Instead, it functions to some degree as a normal sequence of grammatical words,so that the past tense form is kicked the bucket.

But there are a greatnumber of grammatical restrictions. A large number of idioms contain a verb anda noun, but although the verb may be placed in the past tense, the number ofthe noun can never be changed.We have spilled the beans, but not spill the bean and equally there is no fly off the handles, kick thebuckets, put on good faces, blow one s tops, etc. Similarly, with redherring the noun may be plural, but the adjective cannot be comparative the -er form . Thus we find red herrings but not redderherring.

There are also plenty of syntactic restrictions.Some idioms havepassives, but others do not. The law was laid down and The beans havebeen spilled are all right though some may question the latter , but Thebucket was kicked is not. But in no case could we say It was the - beans that were spilled, law that was laid down, bucket that was kicked,etc The restrictions vary from idiom to idiom.

Some are more restricted or frozen than others.A very common type of idiom in English is what is usually called the phrasal verb , the combination of verb plus adverb of the kind make up,give in, put down. The meaning of these combinations cannot be predictedfrom the individual verb and adverb and in many cases there is a single verbwith the same or a very close meaning - invent, yield, quell.

Not allcombinations of this kind are idiomatic, of course. Put down has aliteral sense too and there are many others that are both idiomatic and not, e.g. take in as in The conjuror took the audience in, The woman tookthe homeless children in. There are even degrees of idiomaticity since onecan make up a story, make up a fire or make up one s face.Moreover, it is nof only sequences of verb plus adverb that may be idiomatic.There are also sequences of verb plus preposition, such as look afterand go for, and sequences of verb, adverb and preposition, such as putup with tolerate or do away with kill .There are also what we may call partial idioms, where one of the wordshas its usual meaning, the other has a meaning that is peculiar to theparticular sequence.

Thus red hair refers to hair, but not hair that isred in strict colour terms.Comedians have fun with partial idioms of thiskind, e. g. when instructed to make a bed they bring out a set ofcarpenter s tools.

An interesting set involves the-word white, for whitecoffee is brown in colour, white wine is usually yellow, and white people arepink.Yet, white is, perhaps, idiomatic only to some degree - it couldbe interpreted the lightest in colour of that usually to be found . Notsurprisingly black is used as its antonym for coffee and people thoughagain neither are black in colour terms , yet it is not used for wine. Thus itcan be seen that even partial idiomaticity can be a matter of degree and may insome cases be little more than a matter of collocational restriction.

On a morecomic level there is partial idiomaticity in raining cats and dogs inWelsh it rains old women and sticks! .What is and what is not an idiom is, then often a matter of degree.Itis very difficult, moreover, to decide whether a word or a sequence of words isopaque. We could, perhaps,define idioms in terms of non-equivalence in other languages, so that kickthe bucket, red herring, etc are idioms because they cannot be directlytranslated into French or German.

But this will not really work. The French fornurse is garde-malade, but while this cannot be directly translated intoEnglish it is quite transparent, obviously meaning someone who looks after thesick. On the ofher hand, look after seems quite idiomatic, yet it can bequite directly translated into Welsh edrych ar o1.

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