ABSTRACT
This chapter is a brief report of our investigation into the occurrence and use of idiomatic expressions in ordinary conversation. We are focusing here on those expressions that are mainly figurative; they are phrases (i.e., they are larger than words) that are formulaic or relatively fixed in composition (syntactically, lexically, and sometimes prosodically; but note extract (6) for a recognizable idiom, despite some lexical variation from the standard). Hence they may, like words, be learned separately as single units of the language (see Fillmore, Kay, & O'Connor (1988); but for a different view, see Gibbs & Nayak (1989)). Furthermore, often their meanings are not the same as, or cannot be derived from, the meanings of their constituent words—which creates the distinction between their literal and figurative meanings, a distinction that is the starting point of so much of the research in this area (e.g., Gibbs (1987); van Lancker (1990)). Examples of such idiomatic phrases, which may be referred to as figures of speech, are take with a pinch of salt, had a good innings, and iron itself out. 1
