engleski

What constitutes the core of a verbal idiom? Stability and variation in a cross-linguistic perspective.

Studies of idiom variation have shown that the variant forms in which an idiom may occur are constrained by the cognitive mechanism or mechanisms motivating its meaning. Furthermore, it has been shown that there are some general patterns underlying idiom variation cross-linguistically. For example, the variation of verbal idioms which contain the preposition in is dependent on the CONTAINER image schema (Langlotz 2006 ; Parizoska 2009, 2010 ; Parizoska i Novoselec 2010). When it comes to the mechanisms underlying the variation of verbal idioms, the key issue is the extent to which their forms can be changed and which parts are invariable. It has been proposed that what remains unchanged is an idiom’s core (Langlotz 2006), i.e. the lexical constituents which reflect the idiomatic meaning. However, items which have the highest probability to activate idiomatic structures have not been defined, but merely exemplified (Langlotz 2006: 219): e.g. highly salient lexical constituents (bandwagon) and the co-occurrence of core lexical constituents (spill + beans). Furthermore, it has not been specified what types of lexical co-occurrences are so distinctive as to be recognizable as idioms. Therefore, the question is: which constituents are salient enough to evoke a specific idiomatic construction? The aim of this paper is to establish what types of lexical items constitute the core of a verbal idiom. More specifically, by exploring the variant forms of English and Croatian verbal idioms in large corpora, we will attempt to determine whether there are any common patterns in which salient components form the core in different languages. We will present a part of a larger contrastive study. We performed a corpus study of 85 English idioms in enTenTen13 and 92 Croatian idioms in hrWaC. Since verb variation is the most common type, for each idiom we looked at the collocates of one or both of its nominal constituents. The results show that in both languages several types of lexical items may be considered salient enough to evoke specific idiomatic constructions. Thus, a single item constitutes the core only if it is a highly specific noun (e.g. brunt in bear the brunt of ; Rubikon ‘Rubicon’ in prijeći Rubikon ‘cross the Rubicon’). In other cases the core is a construction consisting of different types of lexical items, such as a noun and a modifier (e.g. field day in have a field day), a preposition and a noun (na ‘on’ + živci ‘nerves’ in ići komu na živce ‘get on someone’s nerves’), etc. Corpus data also show that noun case plays an important role in Croatian. For instance, the genitive and accusative case of hladna glava (lit. cool head) evoke different forms of the idiom meaning ‘stay calm in difficult situations’: ostati hladne-GEN glave-GEN (lit. stay cool-headed) and zadržati hladnu-ACC glavu-ACC (lit. keep a cool head), respectively. Overall, the results show that one of the major factors underlying idiom variation in different languages is recoverability: an idiom may be changed only to such an extent that its conventionalized form can be recognized and retrieved from its salient constituents.

verbal idioms, variation, core, English, Croatian, corpora

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