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Publication details [#5031]

Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 1990. Psycholinguistic studies on the conceptual basis of idiomaticity. Cognitive Linguistics 1 : 417–451. 35 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Abstract

Traditional theories of idiomaticity assume that idioms once had metaphorical origins, but have lost their metaphoricity over time and now exist as "dead" metaphors with their figurative meanings being directly stipulated in the mental lexicon. Idioms are thought to be non-compositional since the figurative meanings of these expressions are not functions of the meanings of their individual parts. The aim of this article is to review some of the very recent research in cognitive psycholinguistics that questions some of these long-standing assumptions. Various empirical results demonstrate that the individual words in many idioms systematically contribute to the overall figurative interpretations of these phrases. People's intuitions about the analyzability of idioms plays an important role in determining the syntactic and lexical properties of idioms, as well as in explaining how idioms are learned and comprehended. Other research suggests that the meanings of many idioms are partially motivated by people's conceptual knowledge of the concepts to which idioms refer. Furthermore, the contextual appropriateness of idioms can be readily explained, contrary to the traditional view, by the conceptual links between an idiom and a given situational context. The evidence reported here support theories of idiomaticity that specifically acknowledge the conceptual foundations for idiomatic meanings. These findings also lend credence to the growing idea in cognitive linguistics that language and thought are tightly interdependent based on our conceptualizations of experience. (Raymond Gibbs)