ABSTRACT
A successful natural language understander, be it a human or a machine, fre quently is faced with the problem of making sense of linguistic expressions that do not necessarily mean what they say. There are many different kinds of ex pressions that have this property, some of which have received more attention in the research literature than others. There has been, for example, a great deal of work on the processes involved in the comprehension of indirect speech acts (e.g., Clark & Lucy, 1975; Gibbs, 1983) and there is an even larger literature on the comprehension of metaphorical uses of language (e.g., Ortony, in press). However, until recently, the comprehension of idioms has been studied less extensively, partly perhaps because there is a rather appealing and intuitive view of the nature of idioms that has the effect of depriving the question of how they are understood of any really interesting or problematic properties. We refer to this as the “idioms-are-big-words” view.
