The conclusion to be derived from the discussions above is this: an idiom is either fixed or syntactically analyzable, and in the former case, it should be considered a single lexical item with lexical integrity, while in the latter case, the thematic structure of the head predicator and the f- and c-structures of the idiom are no different from those of the regular, literal expression. To account for the idiomatic readings, I propose a solution based on Her, Higginbotham, and Pentheroudakis (1994), Wasow et al (1983), and Lakoff (1987); a solution that considers the subparts of an idiom as analyzable and compositional elements with metaphorical references.
Her et al (1994) present a treatment of idioms within an LFG-based machine translation system and recognize two types of idioms: 1) lexical idioms, continuous phrases stored as lexical units in the lexicon; 2) transfer idioms, idiom phrases that parse compositionally to produce a non-ambiguous f-structure but translate literally and idiomatically to two distinct phrases in the target language. In this approach, a lexical idiom is a fixed expression, or more precisely a lexical item, for example you-know-who, who-done-it, tongue-in-cheek, or the many VO compounds that we have discussed in Chapter III and IV. A genuine idiom phrase must be syntactically analyzable and its syntactic structure is never ambiguous. Since I have demonstrated in earlier sections that previous accounts that pose distinct thematic structures, f-structures, or c-structures for idiom phrases are all unsatisfactory or unworkable, the solution I propose will adopt Her et al's position that idioms do not have different syntactic or thematic structures.
Wasow et al (1983) examine several different types of idioms in English, most of which are of the VO construction and their conclusion can be seen as three closely related but logically separate claims. First, they argue that syntactically phrasal idioms have normal structures. This is
the same position upheld in Her et al (1994), Stock (1987), Wasow et al (1983), Gazdar et al (1985), among others, and it is also the position I will take here. Their second claim is that, semantically, idioms differ in terms of whether the assignment of the idiomatic meaning is to the idiom chunk as a whole or to its parts. In other words, some idioms are semantically analyzable and compositional, while others are not. They distinguish three classes: 1) noncompositional idioms (kick the bucket, saw log); 2) conventionalized metaphors (take advantage of, spill the beans); and 3) compositional idioms (pull strings). This position is also rather reasonable as that the associations between forms and meanings in idioms are not equally motivated or arbitrary. However, I do not agree with their conclusion that a uniform analysis of idioms is therefore not available.
The third claim that Wasow et al make is that the syntactic constraints of idioms are to a large extent predictable by the semantic relationships among their parts. While Wasow et al have made a strong case for their first two claims with ample examples and discussions, this last claim is much less substantiated and in fact may be logically circular. Take kick the bucket for example.
They first claim that the idiomatic meaning is assigned to the whole phrase and not composed of idiomatic interpretations of the parts, and then claim that the fact that internal modifiers on the bucket are ruled out is thus predictable because the bucket has no idiomatic meaning of its own.
However, I contend that the reversal of this argument is just sensible: that the bucket in the idiom does not allow modification or extraction indicates that it does not have an independent meaning.
One can also argue that the idiomatic meaning of kick the bucket is composed of idiomatic interpretations of its parts and that this idiom imposes a set of syntactic constraints, including one that bars internal modifiers. After all, as shown in section 1 with the two verbs eat and devour and the several pairs of idioms kick someone's ass and kiss someone's ass, hold your horses and hold your breath, and Chinese chi1 dou4fu3 (eat tofu) 'to flirt' and peng4 ding1zi (knock-against nail) 'to be rejected', idioms with very similar semantic structures may behave in different ways syntactically. This line of argument also fares much better with the creative uses such as kick the political/financial bucket; indeed, nothing in principle would rule out the possibility that these creative uses become part of the conventionalized idiom.
Lakoff (1987) provides an account of idioms within the overall scheme of metaphor, metonymy, and conventional image, which is much more general. Here is a quote from him regarding the analysis on Japanese classifiers, which, I think, applies quite well to his analysis of idioms as well.
Ideally, each instance of a classifier outside the central sense should have a motivation. The motivation cannot be ad hoc--one cannot just make up a metony-my or image schema just to handle that case. This imposes a criteria of adequacy on the analysis of classifier languages. (Lakoff (1987:107)
Thus, each idiom should ideally have a motivation, be it metaphorical like blow one's top or ji1dan4 li3 tiao1 gu3tou2 (egg inside pick bone) 'to be unreasonably critical', metonymical like put in a good word for someone or bi4 yan3 (close eyes) 'to die', mental imagery like saw logs or qiao4 bian4zi (stick-up braid) 'to die', or some types of combination of two or more motivations, for example zheng1 yi1 zhi1 yan3, bi4 yi1 zhi1 yan3 (open one eye, close one eye) 'to turn a blind eye' can be seen as both metaphorical and metonymical and hell freezes over can be both metaphorical and imageable. I also agree that the motivation of any idiom should not be ad hoc; however, that does not mean motivations of idioms are all equally transparent. To use an example from Wasow et al (1983:111): saw logs and kick the bucket.
What is different about these two idioms, however, is that the relationship between the literal and idiomatic interpretations in saw logs is relatively transparent, viz., the sound of sawing logs is similar to that of snoring. Hence this
idiom is probably interpretable to those unfamiliar with it, by means of the normal mechanisms for interpreting metaphors (whatever they might be); in contrast, we presume that kick the bucket would be uninterpretable (on its idiomatic sense) to a first-time hearer.
Recognizing Lakoff's position and Wasow et al's observation, the point I want to make is this: the degree of motivation and the degree of transparency of the motivation may vary from idiom to idiom, and more importantly, from time to time and from speaker to speaker. For example, the seemingly unmotivated and opaque idiom kick the bucket, assuming its motivation was from the mental image that someone completes the act of hanging oneself by kicking the bucket one stands on, could be quite transparent at one time to speakers in certain regions and maybe even today. On the other hand, the idiom saw logs may still be part of a person's 'vocabulary' even if that person has never actually heard the sound of sawing logs. Much like the difference between etymology and folk etymologies (such as instances of back formation), it is a linguist's job to find out the overall network of systematic metaphors in a language (and perhaps culture) that idioms fit in and the history of each idiom. However, for the naive native speaker, many of the idioms may simply be conventionalized expressions and/or have motivations different from the genuine original motivations. Between opaqueness and transparency is thus a continuum.
As Lakoff has recognized (1987:451), idioms that have ambiguous, or even conflicting, idiomatic interpretations serve as the most illuminating examples for the varying degree of transparency in idioms. Consider the idiom a rolling stone gathers no moss. Although the motivation is clearly metaphorical, there are two primary interpretations of this metaphor that are nearly opposite: 1) one cannot accumulate good things, e.g., wealth and status, if one does not stay in one place, and 2) one loses his freedom or vitality if one stays at a place too long. In the first reading, the moss is viewed as a good thing, while seen as something negative in the second reading. An example from Chinese is bi4 yan3 (close eyes) 'to die' and bi4bi yan3jing1 (close eyes) 'to take a nap'. With the delimitive aspect of the verb bi4 'to close' by way of reduplication, the second idiom does not follow the first idiom to mean 'to die a little'. With a similar motivation based on an image and perhaps metonymy, the two idioms however do not share a similar semantic content.
Perhaps more drastically than regular lexical items, idioms may also widen or narrows its semantic range or become obsolete as time goes. Take idiom chi1 dou4fu3 (eat tofu) 'to flirt' for example. The image of tofu takes after the fair supple flesh of a woman and thus the idiom was first used to refer to a man's taking advantage of a woman in a physical manner with sexual implications.
However, the idiomatic interpretation is now much wider: both sexes may be at the giving end or the receiving end and the action may be physical or verbal. For some speakers, this idiom has been even further bleached of ths sexual connotation and simply means to tease someone.
To be brief, in the solution I propose, phrasal idioms have regular syntactic structures, or a-structure, f-a-structure, and c-structure in LFG terms, and have motivations based on metaphors, metonymies, or mental images, with a varying degree of transparency between the literal reading and the idiomatic interpretation. Therefore, the solution consists of two essential parts: (1) syntactic constraints on the idiom interpretation of an idiom, and (2) motivation of the idiom interpretation. I will propose a formulation of (1) within LFG and adopt Lakoff's treatment of (2). I will explain (2) first. Lakoff (1987:448) clearly defines the concept of motivation as follows:
The relationship between A and B is motivated just in case there is an independently existing link, L, such that A-L-B "fit together." L makes sense of the relationship between A and B.
The link between the literal meaning and the idiomatic interpretation may be of the form image + knowledge + metaphor(s). For an idiom, although the image described by its literal reading may be quite vague in many ways, the actual image associated with the idiom may be far more specific and thus can be considered as conventional. Lakoff (1987:448-449) uses the idiom keep someone at arm's length as an example. The literal reading of the phrase says nothing about the height or the orientation of the arm, the position of the hand, among other things. However, the conventional image associated with the idiom is largely stable in many respects, such as the arm is tense, not lax, and chest high, extending forward with open palm facing the other person's front. In addition, there is specific knowledge associated with such images, such as the purpose of the extending arm is to prevent the possible harm that this someone could inflict. The image, the knowledge, and two metaphors that exist independently in the conceptual system of English speakers complete the link. Finally, two metaphors that exist independently in the conceptual system of English speakers are also part of the link:
153. Intimacy is Physical Closeness.
154. Social (or Psychological) Harm is Physical Harm.
The conventional image, the associated knowledge, and the two metaphors complete the link. Keeping someone away physically at arm's length is keeping him from getting physically close, and thereby keeping him from inflicting physical harm on oneself. The metaphors map this knowledge into the idiomatic meaning, to keep someone from inflicting social or psychological harm on oneself by keeping him from becoming intimate. The explanation goes like this in detail (Lakoff 1987:449):
-The literal meaning of the idiom fits the conventional image (although undermines it).
-The image has accompanying knowledge.
-The two metaphors map the literal meaning, the image, and its associated knowledge into the meaning of the idiom.
-Letting A be the idiom and B be its meaning, L is the conventional image plus its associated knowledge plus the two metaphors. L thus links A to B.
A consequence of this account is that the more motivated an idiomatic reading is, the more elaborate the link is. In other words, the more intricate the link between the idiom and its meaning is, the more transparent the link, L, is, the easier to make sense out of the idiom. The simpler, the more opaque, the more arbitrary. Take the idiom kick the bucket as another example, whose idiomatic reading is in general considered less motivated, thus opaque. The link is simply an image of someone kicking a (perhaps upside-down) bucket (perhaps while standing on it) and the knowledge that the image is associated with death. There are no independently motivated general metaphors involved.
Lakoff's account is adopted as the second part of the solution I propose, that is motivations of the idiomatic interpretations. I will now complete the solution by demonstrating how the syntactic restrictions that idioms impose on their idiomatic readings can be specified. Again, take keep someone at arm's length for example.
155a. She kept John at an arm's distance. (=) b. She kept John at full arm's length. (=) c. John was kept at arm's length (by her). (=,#)
Unlike the idioms kiss/kick someone's ass, which allow the synonymous behind or butt for ass, this idiom does not allow distance to replace length. While it allows passive, it does not allow any modifiers or determiners on either arm or length. All these have to be accounted for. I propose that such conditions be specified in the lexical entry of the idiom's lexical head, the verb. Thus, in the lexical entry of keep, there is a set of conditions to be checked. Another example shown below is for chi1 'eat' as in chi1 dou4fu3 (eat tofu) 'to flirt (with)'.
156. keep V
PRED 'KEEP <ag-SUBJ th-OBJ loc-OBL>' IF [ SUBJ HUMAN =c +
[ OBJ HUMAN =c + 'active OR
OBJ = NONE 'passive VOICE =c PASSIVE ]
OBLloc PRED =c LENGTH OBLloc PFORM =c AT OBLloc ADJS = NONE OBLloc POSS PRED =c ARM OBLloc POSS DEFINITE = NONE ~ OBLloc POSS ADJS
]
THEN [ IDIOM-LINK = keep-at-arm's-length ]
157. chi1 V
PRED 'CHI1 <ag-SUBJ th-OBJ>' IF [ SUBJ HUMAN =c +
OBJ PRED =c 'TOFU' [ IF OBJ ADJS
THEN OBJ ADJS =c {[PRED 'RUAN3'] }
] (tender)
[ IF OBJ POSS
THEN OBJ POSS HUMAN =c + ]
]
THEN [ IDIOM-LINK = chi1-dou4fu3 ]
If the syntactic constraints are all fulfilled, the f-structure of keep..at arm's length and chi1 dou4fu3 is assigned an attribute LINK with respective value of the appropriate idiom link, which triggers the idiom interpretation mechanism just described above and thus links the 'qualified' f-structure with their idiomatic interpretation.4
158. An LFG model of idiomatic linking
'literal' f-structure
<--- syntactic conditions (1) 'qualified' f-structure
<--- idiom link (2) idiomatic interpretation
In summary, the solution I propose integrates (1) LFG's lexical specifications in functional terms, and (2) Lakoff's account of idioms based on motivation. The lexical head of an idiom instantiates the checking of a set of f-structure conditions; if fulfilled, the f-structure, now assigned the feature IDIOM-LINK, triggers the idiomatic interpretation linked to the f-structure.