The access and processing of idiomatic expressions

Abstract

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases. In both studies a Phrase Classification Task was utilized. In this, reaction times to determine whether or not word strings constituted acceptable English phrases were measured. Classification times were significantly faster to idiom than to matched control phrases. This effect held under conditions involving different categories of idioms, different transitional probabilities among words in the phrases, and different levels of awareness of the presence of idioms in the materials. The data support a Lexical Representation Hypothesis for the processing of idioms.Investigation of the processes underlying sentence comprehension has tended, understandably enough, to consider the more simple cases which confront the listener. For example, examinations of lexical processing during sentence comprehension have typically employed words with straightforward and easily derived interpretations. While an important exception to this rule is the study of lexical ambiguities, even this work deals with words which possess relatively well-defined literal meanings. There is, however, a large class of items--including idioms, metaphors, and proverbs--which are extraordinarily common in the language but which have been largely ignored in comprehension research; the few attempts to discover how the compre- hension device computes nonliteral meanings for these items have found them to be remarkably intractable. The high frequency of occurrence ofnonliteral materials alone necessitates that the processes responsible for their comprehension be incorporated in any complete comprehension model. Idioms, in particular, present an important challenge to those interested in building a performance model for sentence comprehension, and the purpose of this paper is to examine some of the basic aspects of how we come to understand idiomatic expressions. In order to see the nature of the problems that idioms raise for the comprehension device it is first necessary to consider exactly what constitutes an idiom. In its simplest form an idiom is a string of two or more words for which meaning is not derived from the meanings of the individual words comprising that string. Thus, the idiomatic meaning of "kick the bucket" has little to do with the meanings of either "kick" or "bucket"; similarly, the meaning of "by and large" has little to do with the meanings of either "large" or "by."Thus, by and large, idioms defy traditional concepts of syntactic and semantic analysis,

Three factors in language variation

“…Fortunately, the important study of Swinney & Cutler (1979) provides experimental results which lend support to the productivity model developed here. Swinney & Cutler conduct a series of experiments investigating the real time processing complexity of idiomatic expressions such as "he kicked the bucket" compared with fully compositional ones such as "he lifted the bucket".…”

The role of the striatum in sentence processing: Evidence from a priming study in early stages of Huntington's disease

“…According to several linguistic accounts, idiomatic sentences such as " [Paul] kicked the bucket" are stored in the mental lexicon as extended language chunks (Chomsky, 1980;Swinney & Cutler, 1979). Indeed, access to the 'arbitrary' idiom meaning (" [Paul] has died") does not depend on syntactic rules, the application of which would convey a literal sentence meaning (" [Paul] has 'crushed' the bucket").…”

Τhe primitives of the lexicon: Insights from aspect in idioms

“…More often than not, idioms have been conceptualized as elementary units stored in the lexicon (e.g., Swinney & Cutler 1979;Di Sciullo & Williams 1987;van Gestel 1995;Glasbey 2003 etc. ); in other words, as units lexically licensed instead of syntactically derived in a way similar to that of non-idiomatic language.…”

“…If IPs are not stored in the lexicon, it is a reasonable assumption that the semantic activation or identification involved in word recognition could potentially differ from that of IP recognition. Although there are studies suggesting that idioms are stored in the lexicon and retrieved in a way identical to words (Swinney & Cutler 1979), there are also neurolinguistic studies that generated evidence for the opposite. Tabossi & Zardon (1993; found that the onset of an idiomatic chunk does not initiate the activation of the idiomatic interpretation and their results suggested that the activation of IP meanings is slower and makes relevant factors other than the ones involved in word recognition.…”

“…The background assumption of this debate is that non-idiomatic, compositional phrases are syntactically derived, while idiomatic phrases are non-compositional and holistically stored instead of syntactically derived. The idea of associating idioms with stored units in the mental lexicon is frequently found in the literature (see, among others, Swinney & Cutler 1979;Di Sciullo & Williams 1987;Nunberg et al 1994;van Gestel 1995; and the references in Snider & Arnon 2012). At times, this idea is also put forth in the literature that deals with aspect in idioms (Glasbey 2003;.…”