Idiom and Phraseology

Sailer, Manfred

doi:10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0137

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…A standardized formulation can consist of just a few words or of several sentences. Phrases or short pieces of text that are frequently used and have a fixed meaning are well known from other disciplines and from general language and are called idiomatic expressions, phrasemes, phraseologisms or routine formulae or routine expressions [2,16]. All these terms are used as synonyms or with slightly different meanings but always for short phrases.…”

Section: Phrasemes and Standardized Passages In Legal Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs

Josi¹,

Wartena²,

Heid³

2021

Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 Workshops

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In order to ensure validity in legal texts like contracts and case law, lawyers rely on standardised formulations that are written carefully but also represent a kind of code with a meaning and function known to all legal experts. Using directed (acyclic) graphs to represent standardized text fragments, we are able to capture variations concerning time specifications, slight rephrasings, names, places and also OCR errors. We show how we can find such text fragments by sentence clustering, pattern detection and clustering patterns. To test the proposed methods, we use two corpora of German contracts and court decisions, specially compiled for this purpose. However, the entire process for representing standardised text fragments is language-agnostic. We analyze and compare both corpora and give an quantitative and qualitative analysis of the text fragments found and present a number of examples from both corpora.

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Section: Phrasemes and Standardized Passages In Legal Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs

Josi¹,

Wartena²,

Heid³

2021

Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 Workshops

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“…A trickier distinction is the one between snowclones and other partially filled constructions like [the X-er the Y-er] (Culicover & Jackendoff 1999) or [What's X doing Y] (Kay & Fillmore 1999), which have been discussed under varying labels such as 'formal idioms' (as opposed to 'substantive'; Fillmore et al 1988), 'constructional idioms' (Booij 2002) and 'phraseme constructions' (Dobrovol'skij 2013). Snowclones could indeed be regarded as a subtype of these constructional idioms (as suggested by Sailer 2013) given that both classes of expressions fulfil criterion (ii), combining fixed lexical elements with variable slots that give rise to the (partial) productivity of the patterns. Nevertheless, the additional criteria (i) and (iii) set snowclones apart from other constructional idioms: neither can constructions like the X-er the Y-er be traced back to a lexically fixed source, nor do they typically display extravagant formal and functional characteristics to the same degree as observed for snowclones.…”

Section: Defining Snowclonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attack of the snowclones: A corpus-based analysis of extravagant formulaic patterns

Hartmann¹,

Ungerer²

2021

Preprint

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The concept of ‘snowclones’ has gained interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies on extravagance and expressiveness in language. However, no clear criteria for identifying snowclones have yet been established, and detailed corpus-based investigations of the phenomenon are still lacking. This paper addresses this research gap in a twofold way: On the one hand, we develop an operational definition of snowclones, arguing that three criteria are decisive: (i) the existence of a lexically fixed source construction; (ii) partial productivity; (iii) “extravagant" formal and/or functional characteristics. On the other hand, we offer an empirical investigation of two snowclones that can be considered ‘prototypical’ on the basis of previous literature, namely [the mother of all X] and [X BE the newY]. We use collostructional analysis and distributional semantics to explore the partial productivity of both patterns’ slot fillers. In sum, we argue that the concept of snowclones, if properly defined, can contribute substantially to our understanding of creative language use, especially regarding the question of how social,cultural, and interpersonal factors influence the choice of more or less salient linguistic constructions.

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“…As such, they are found in many idioms (as implied by the term ‘frozen metaphors’ falsely used as a synonym for idioms in, for example, Handford & Koester, 2010; Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, & Antos, 1978). Idioms are syntactically complex, more or less fixed expressions (Sailer, 2013) such as to throw in the towel , to hit rock bottom , to drink somebody under the table , or to lose one’s heart to somebody . They are a highly pervasive language phenomenon: speakers are estimated to use 7,000 idioms per week (Hoffman, 1984).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metonymies are more literal than metaphors: evidence from ratings of German idioms

Michl

2019

Lang. cogn.

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Metaphor and metonymy are likely the most common forms of non-literal language. As metaphor and metonymy differ conceptually and in how easy they are to comprehend, it seems likely that they also differ in their degree of non-literalness. They frequently occur in idioms which are foremost non-literal, fixed expressions. Given that non-literalness seems to be the defining criterion of what constitutes an idiom, it is striking that no study so far has focused specifically on differing non-literalness in idioms. It is unclear whether and how metaphoric and metonymic structures and their properties are perceived in idioms, given that the comprehension of idioms is driven by a number of other properties that are connected. This study divides idioms according to their metonymic or metaphoric structure and lets participants rate their non-literalness, familiarity, and transparency. It focuses on non-literalness as key property, finds it strongly connected to transparency, and to be the one key factor in predicting idiom type. Specifically, it reveals that metonymies are generally perceived as rather or even extremely literal, while metaphors are generally perceived as highly non-literal.

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Idiom and Phraseology

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs

Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs

Attack of the snowclones: A corpus-based analysis of extravagant formulaic patterns

Metonymies are more literal than metaphors: evidence from ratings of German idioms

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