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Idiom Idioms are traditionally defined as strings of words whose overall meanings are not given as a function of the meanings of their individual parts. American English, for instance, has several thousand idioms, including classic expressions such as ‘pop the question’, ‘blow your stack’, ‘kick the bucket’, ‘red herring’, ‘take advantage of’ and ‘let the cat out of the bag’. These formulaic expressions are often viewed as ‘noncompositional’ or ‘fixed’, such that their meanings must be directly stipulated in the mental lexicon in the same way that the meanings of individual words are listed in a dictionary. People presumably produce and understand idioms as wholes, rather than being generated and comprehended by generative rules of language. For this reason, the study of how people use and understand idioms has historically been considered uninformative in revealing insights into the underlying architecture of the ‘language processor’ that is designed to produce and parse novel expressions. However, there are several reasons to dispute

these common assumptions about idioms. Many idioms are not fixed or frozen, but are decomposable or analyzable with the meanings of their parts contributing independently to their overall figurative meanings (Gibbs 1994; Nunberg et al. 1994). For instance, in the idiomatic phrase ‘pop the question’, people can recognize that the noun ‘question’ refers to a ‘marriage proposal’ when the verb ‘pop’ is used to refer to the manner of uttering it. Similarly, the ‘law’ of ‘lay down the law’ refers to the rules of conduct in certain situations when the verb phrase ‘laying

down’ is used to refer to the act of invoking the law. Idioms such as ‘pop the question’, ‘spill the beans’ and ‘lay down the law’ are ‘decomposable’ because each of their components obviously contributes to their overall figurative interpretations. Other idioms whose individual parts contribute less to its overall figurative meaning are more ‘nondecomposable’ or ‘nonanalyzable’ (e.g. ‘kick the bucket’, ‘shoot the breeze’). Yet many nonanalyzable idioms, even ones thought to be most fixed or frozen such as ‘kick the bucket’, still retain some degree of compositionality. For example, people judge the phrase ‘kick the bucket’ to be more appropriate in a context where the person died quickly, as opposed to dying in a longer, protracted manner (Hamblin and Gibbs 1999). This intuition is motivated by the semantics of ‘kick’ which alludes to a fast, sudden action. In this way, people appear to be analyzing some aspects of the word meanings even when using or understanding nonanalyzable idioms. The partial analyzability of most idioms also

explains why these phrases exhibit tremendous lexical variation (Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg 2001; Langlotz 2006; Moon 1998b). For instance, the main verbs in many idioms can be changed without disrupting these phrases’ figurative meanings, as seen in the following examples: ‘set/start the ball rolling’, ‘fit/fill the bill’, ‘throw/toss in the towel’, ‘lower/let down one’s guard’, ‘step into/fill someone’s shoes’ and ‘play/keep one’s cards close to the chest’. Nouns can also vary in many idioms without disrupting their figurative meanings, such as the changes that can be made in the following pairs of expressions: ‘a piece/slice of the action’, ‘a skeleton in the closet/cupboard’, ‘the calm/lull before the storm’ and ‘a ballpark

figure/estimate’. Not surprisingly, then, the analyzability of many idioms also explains why they are to varying degrees syntactically productive. Thus, ‘John laid down the law’ can be altered into a passive construction like ‘The law was laid down by John’ without disrupting its figurative meaning. The fact that idioms are analyzable to different degrees suggests that an analyzable-nonanalyzable continuum makes more theoretical sense than any rigid distinction between creative speech and conventional language, or between literal and nonliteral meaning. Speakers create and continue to use idioms for

a variety of pragmatic and cognitive reasons. Idioms, like metaphors and many other figurative expressions, are often used for reasons of politeness, to avoid responsibility for the import of what is communicated, to express ideas that are difficult to communicate using literal language, and to express thoughts in a compact and vivid manner. Conventional phrases like ‘blow your stack’ are important to social interaction for manipulating others, asserting separate identity and asserting group identity (Wray and Perkins 2000). Knowing the right idiomatic phrase to use in some situation is critical to marking a speaker as having the right status to be considered a valued member of some community. At the same time, as suggested earlier, idioms are not frozen or fixed, as speakers can re-form standard expressions for different pragmatic reasons (Carter 2004). For instance, one person spoke of his grandfather in a conversation with a friend in the following way: ‘He’s been on like you know doomed to die death’s door for about three years now’ (Carter 2004: 130). By alluding to the phrase ‘to be at/ on death’s door’, the speaker is able to distance himself from an unpleasant topic, while doing so in a playful manner. Speakers’ familiarity with idioms also makes both standard phrases, and creative instantiations of them, relatively easy to produce and understand in discourse (Gibbs 1994). Yet the important empirical demonstrations

on the analyzability of many idioms suggest that the internal semantics of these expressions might be correlated in systematic ways with the concepts to which they refer. In this way, many idioms are created, and continue to have pragmatic value in discourse precisely because

people think in conventional metaphorical and metonymic ways. Much research in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics supports this view (Gibbs 1994; Kovecses 2000). For example, the idiom ‘John spilled the beans’ maps our knowledge of someone tipping over a container of beans onto a person who is revealing some previously hidden secret. English speakers understand ‘spill the beans’ to mean ‘reveal the secret’ because there are underlying conceptual metaphors, such as THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES, that structure their conceptions of minds, secrets, and disclosure. Although the existence of these conceptual metaphors does not predict that certain idioms must appear in the language, the presence of these independent conceptual metaphors by which we make sense of experience provides a partial motivation for why specific phrases (e.g. ‘spill the beans’) are used to refer to particular events (e.g. the revealing of secrets). Other idioms, such as ‘send shivers down my spine’, which refers to being fearful, is motivated by a conceptual metonymy of PHYSICAL AGITATION STANDS FOR FEAR. Most generally, many idioms have important pragmatic and social functions that are closely tied to entrenched patterns of both metaphorical and metonymic thought.