Доклад: Idiom

Доклад: Idiom

Idioms.

Idioms involve collocation of a special kind. Consider, for instance, kick

the bucket, fly off the handle, spill the beans, red herring. For here we

not only have the collocation of kick and the bucket, but also

the fact that the meaning of the resultant combination is opaque - it is not

related to the meaning of the individual words, but is sometimes (though not

always) nearer to the meaning of a single word (thus kick the bucket

equals die).

Even where an idiom is semantically like a single word it does not function 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 great number

of grammatical restrictions. 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 the

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 the

buckets, *put on good faces, *blow one's tops, etc. Similarly, with red

herring the noun may be plural, but the adjective cannot be comparative

(the -er form). Thus we find red herrings but not *redder

herring.

There are also plenty of syntactic restrictions. Some idioms have passives, but

others do not. The law was laid down and The beans have been

spilled are all right (though some may question the latter), but *The

bucket 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 predicted from the

individual verb and adverb and in many cases there is a single verb with the

same or a very close meaning - invent, yield, quell. Not all

combinations of this kind are idiomatic, of course. Put down has a

literal 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 took

the homeless children in. There are even degrees of idiomaticity since one

can 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

after and go for, and sequences of verb, adverb and preposition,

such as put up with ('tolerate') or do away with ('kill').

There are also what we may call partial idioms, where one of the words has its

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

sequence. Thus red hair refers to hair, but not hair that is red in

strict colour terms. Comedians have fun with partial idioms of this kind, e. g.

when instructed to make a bed they bring out a set of carpenter's

tools. An interesting set involves the-word white, for white coffee is

brown in colour, white wine is usually yellow, and white people are pink. Yet,

white is, perhaps, idiomatic only to some degree - it could be interpreted

'the lightest in colour of that usually to be found'. Not surprisingly

black is used as its antonym for coffee and people (though again neither are

black in colour terms), yet it is not used for wine. Thus it can be seen that

even partial idiomaticity can be a matter of degree and may in some cases be

little more than a matter of collocational restriction. On a more comic level

there is partial idiomaticity in raining cats and dogs (in Welsh it

rains old women and sticks!).

What is and what is not an idiom is, then often a matter of degree. It is very

difficult, moreover, to decide whether a word or a sequence of words is opaque.

We could, perhaps, define idioms in terms of non-equivalence in other

languages, so that kick the bucket, red herring, etc., are idioms

because they cannot be directly translated into French or German. But this will

not really work. The French for nurse is garde-malade, but while this

cannot be directly translated into English it is quite transparent, obviously

meaning someone who looks after the sick. On the ofher hand, look after

seems quite idiomatic, yet it can be quite directly translated into Welsh

(edrych ar o1).