IDIOMS

 What are idioms?

 ‘A construction whose meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of its constituents’
(Glucksberg, 2001).
 ‘Frozen patterns of language which allow little or no variation in form and often carry
meanings which cannot be deduced from their individual components’ (Baker, 1992).
 Croatian: frazem

 Characteristics of idioms
 You usually cannot do any of the following things to an idiom:
 Change the word order (e.g. downs and ups)
 Delete a word from it (e.g. spill beans)
 Add a word to it (e.g. face the classical music)
 Replace a word with another (e.g. bury a hatchet)
 Change its grammatical structure (e.g. the music was faced)

 Idioms are often culture- and language-specific (e.g. take coals to New Castle)
 They can take different forms and structures – some are even grammatically incorrect e.g.
do the dirty on someone.
 A certain phrase has to be institutionalized in order to become an idiom (i.e. it has to be
recognized and accepted as an idiom in a particular speech community).

 Flexibility
 This characteristic refers to the degree to which idioms can tolerate morphological and
syntactic changes.
 Some idioms do not allow any changes (e.g. idiomatic pairs) – they are called ‘frozen idioms’
 Others allow some changes e.g. ‘He has kicked the bucket’ is OK but ‘The bucket was kicked
by him’ is not.

 Transparency
 This characteristic refers to the transparency of the metaphorical meaning of an idiom (i.e.
whether we can understand what it means without a dictionary).
 Transparent metaphor makes an idiom easy to understand e.g. to talk behind one’s back
(they are called transparent idioms)
 Idioms whose meaning cannot be deduced literally are called opaque idioms (e.g. to take
coals to New Castle)

 Which phrases are considered idioms?

 Experts have different answers to this question.
 Moon (1998) believes that idioms belong to a broad category called ‘fixed expressions’.
 According to the author, fixed expressions encompass idioms, collocations, proverbs, similes
and sayings.
 According to Fernando (1996), all conventionalized phrases can be called idioms (including
the above mentioned).

 Types of idioms:
 Single word (cool, brainy)
 Verbal idioms (V + O) e.g. have second thoughts
 Prepositional phrases e.g. in cold blood
 Adjective phrases e.g. wet behind the ears
 Word pairs e.g. safe and sound
 Similes (as + adjective + as + N) e.g. as blind as a bat
 Conversational phrases (e.g. Long time, no see)