According to the modularity of syntax and lexicon I have assumed, an idiom with phrasal characteristics must be recognized as a phrase. Nonetheless, not all phrases are equal in their 'syntacticity', or syntactic freedom. Nicolas (1995), for example, distinguishes a typology of 1) free combinations, 2) collocations, and 3) idioms among V-NP phrases. An idiom is in fact like a metaphor or an instance of it in that it is understood in terms of another kind of meaning or experience, one that is denoted by the literal reading of the idiom.
However, the difference is that the metaphors enjoy much more syntactic freedom than idioms. Thus, I observe the following hierarchy of syntacticity among different types of phrases in descending order.
159. Degree of syntacticity:
free combinations > collocations > metaphors > idioms
By the same token, not all lexical items are equal in their degree of lexicality. A monosyllabic word in Chinese is the most lexical in that it is nearly impossible to be 'ionized' into a phrase (in the sense of Chao (1968)) even temporally as in a language play.5 Among bisyllabic or polysyllabic words, a distinction can still be made between non-derived words, such as er4luo2si1 'Russia', mei2gui4 'rose', and buo1li2 'glass', and derived words, which can be further classified into several categories with varying degrees of lexicality. They include people's full names, e.g., deng4 xiao3ping2 'Deng Xioaping' and deng4 li4jun1 'Terresa Teng', compounds, e.g., guan1xin1 (close heart) 'be concerned about' and ai4ren2 (love person) 'lover' or 'spouse', prefixed words, e.g., lao3shu3 'mouse' and di4yi1 'first', suffixed words, e.g., yi3zi 'chair' and wo3men 'we', and reduplication, e.g., chang2chang2 'often' and huan1huan1xi3xi3 'happily'. Thus, a hierarchy of lexicality may roughly look like this in ascending order:
160. Degree of lexicality:
fixed idioms < personal full names < compounds < polysyllabic words < monosyllabic words
This observation confirms Lakoff's (1987:852) position that it is a continuum between syntax and lexicon. Furthermore, it validates Hsieh's extension of the concept of competition
in Wang's lexical diffusion hypothesis to the entire grammar. Therefore, the hierarchy of syntacticity and the hierarchy of lexicality can be viewed as the perpetual competition between the syntactic force and the lexical force. In syntax, while the syntactic force prevails, phrases, such as idioms, may still exhibit varying degrees of lexical influence. Likewise, in the lexicon, lexical items are subject to the dominant lexical force but certain types of lexical items are far more likely, practically and psychologically, to be broken up into phrases.
Idioms, as demonstrated in previous sections, seem to be 'split' between syntax and lexicon. On the one hand, they must be recognized as phrases due to their syntactic behavior;
on the other hand, they allow at best a drastically restricted range of syntactic environments in comparison to regular phrases. These syntactic restrictions, as I have argued in the previous section, need to be lexically specified (see also van Gestel (1995) and Jackendoff (1995) for lexically constraining idiom phrases). Likewise, semantically, most idioms, as argued in Wasow et al (1983), Lakoff (1987), and Her et al (1994), among others, can indeed be viewed as compositional; however, it is also clear that in most cases the parts of a compositional idiom, unlike regular lexical items, do not individually, in isolation, correspond to an identifiable meaning in the idiomatic interpretations. Again, while an idiom may be compositional like a regular phrase, the restricted individual idiomatic reading must be lexically linked.
Thus, from the perspective of the competition between syntax and lexicon, while the syntactic force prevails in idiom phrases, the lexical force has its claim as well as the constraints need to be lexically specified. The see-saw battle can also be seen in the changes that idioms undergo. An idiom, for example, may relax its semantic and/or syntactic constraints through time.6 As mentioned earlier, the idiom chi4 dou4fu3 (eat tofu) 'to flirt' has extended the agent's male gender to both genders and has also increased the syntactic environ-ments allowed for its idiomatic meaning.7 Conversely, an idiom may in time become completely restricted and ultimately lexicalized into a fixed idiom, thus a lexical item. Many compounds, for example cut-throat, break-neck, know-it-all, pick-me-up, who-dunit, and stick-to-itiveness in English and wang4wo3 (forget self) 'to be totally absorbed' and dan1xin1 (carry heart) 'worry' in Chinese, can all find their origin in a phrase. The idiom qiao4 bian4zi 'to die', for example, seems to have become more constrained than before and is on its way to lexicalization and perhaps distinction. Most of the younger speakers, below 25, I have checked with do not allow any internal modification on bian4zi, while most of the older speakers, above 40, accept the following sentence as idiomatic.
162. Zhe4 xiao3gui3 bu4 ting1 lao3zi de hua4, jie2guo3 this kid not listen I POSS word consequently
ba3 ge xiao3 bian4zi gei3 qiao4diao4 ba1?
BA CLS small braid GEI stick-off PTCL
See, this dude wouldn't listen to me, so he kissed his young life good-bye, didn't he?
What we have is thus a sort of 'lexical diffusion' in grammar--a phrase may lose its syntacticity not abruptly, but gradually, construction by construction, speaker by speaker. In other words, the lexical force diffuses through the syntactic constructions that its target phrase allows. The syntactic force, likewise, may 'invade' the lexicon and break up a lexical item and increase its syntacticity by gradually admitting more syntactic constructions. In the case of chi1 dou4fu3, then, the syntactic force has been gaining more and more ground as the idiom allows a broader range of semantic and syntactic environments for its idiomatic interpretation.
7. CONCLUSION
Idioms have two defining characteristics: non-literal interpretations and (somewhat arbitrary) syntactic constraints. They should be recognized as phrases if they are not fixed, in
other words if they violate lexical integrity. An adequate treatment of idiom phrases therefore must account for not only the relationship between the idiomatic meaning and the literal syntactic parts but also the allowable syntactic environments in which the idiomatic reading obtains. I have discussed the three possible planes in LFG where the ambiguous readings and the relationship between them can be accounted for and demonstrated that the c-structure account implicit in Chao (1968) and Li and Thompson (1981), the f-structure solution given by Huang (1990a), and Bresnan's (1982b) account at the thematic structure are all inadequate.
Contrary to the conventional view that idiomatic interpretations are non-compositional (e.g., Huang 1990a, Bresnan 1982b, among others), I contended that the subparts of an idiom are syntactically analyzable and to a large extend semantically compositional with metaphorical references, a position in line with Her et all (1994), Wasow et al (1983), Lakoff (1987), among others. The solution I proposed integrates two essential theoretical constructs: one, LFG's lexical specifications in functional terms, and two, Lakoff's account of idioms based on the concept of motivation. The lexical head of an idiom instantiates a set of f-structure conditions; if satisfied, the f-structure is linked to the idiomatic interpretation. The link provides the motivation for the idiomatic interpretation of the qualified f-structure. This solution offers a unified treatment of extractable as well as non-extractable idioms and does not increase the formal power of LFG. Finally, within this analysis, I provided an interactionist interpretation of the semantic and syntactic behavior of idioms in particular and the continuum of 'syntacticity' and 'lexicality' among various types of phrases and lexical items in general.
NOTES
1. I have run into several interesting examples of this kind of creative use of idioms. 'We will stay in this race until hell freezes over, and then we will fight on the ice' (1996 U.S.
presidential candidate Pat Buchanan on staying in the race for the Republican nomination, emphasis added). 'Bob Dole just put in a few more nails in the campaign coffin' (CNN Headline News, March 12, 1996, on Super Tuesday; emphasis added). '...the sixty-four thousand yen question' (Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten, Feb. 18, 1995, to the National Press Club, Australia). In the Chin novel Ru2lin2 Wai4shi3 there is a famous quote that also involves this kind of language play: lai4ha2ma xiang3 chi1 tien1er2 pi4 (toad want eat swan fart) 'having undeserving desires', where the usual tien1er2 rou4 'swan meat' has been 'demoted' to tien1er2 pi4 'swan fart'.
2. A much more dramatic illustration is given in Sag and Pollard with a set of English verbs closely related in meaning to become (1989:171):
161a. Kim grew poetical.
b.*Kim grew a success.
c.*Kim grew sent more and more leaflets.
d.*Kim grew doing all the work.
e. Kim grew to like anchovies.
162a. Kim got poetical.
b.*Kim got a success.
c. Kim got sent more and more leaflets.
d.*Kim got doing all the work.
e. Kim got to like anchovies.
163a. Kim turned out poetical.
b. Kim turned out a success.
c.*Kim turned out sent more and more leaflets.
d.*Kim turned out doing all the work.
e. Kim turned out to like anchovies.
164a. Kim ended up poetical.
b. Kim ended up a success.
c.*Kim ended up sent more and more leaflets.
d. Kim ended up doing all the work.
e.*Kim ended up to like anchovies.
165a. Kim waxed poetical.
b.*Kim waxed a success.
c.*Kim waxed sent more and more leaflets.
d.*Kim waxed doing all the work.
e.*Kim waxed to like anchovies.
3. Another complication of setting up a homophone entry for an idiomatic verb like chi1 is that all the morphological processes, e.g., resultaive, reduplication, hao-compounding, and gei-compounding, that the verb undergoes have to be duplicated, once for the regular verb, once for the idiomatic verb.
4. Idioms may certainly be organized into subclasses with shared syntactic and functional specifications abstracted in separate inheritance entries. Refer to Her (1990) for such an implementation of inheritance structure. Also refer to Her et al (1994) for a computational implementation of idiomatic specification.
5. In the following English example, the syntactic force has given the compound blue chips a 'crack'--'From the bluest of blue chips to the most wildly speculative over-the-counter stocks...' (Wall Street Journal; emphasis added). All following examples show a similar 'crack': 'Smoking or non?', 'Are you pro or anti-capital punishment?', and 'SKIN OR SCUBA DIVING IS PROHIBITED' (sign posted at Santa Cruz Fishermen's Wharf).
6. In a study using a 50-million-word English newspaper corpus, Nicolas (1995:1) discovered that:
... contrary to received views, at least 90% of V-NP idioms, including many usually regarded as completely frozen, appear to allow some form of (syntactically) internal modification.
7. See note 6 and the examples in note 1, which all show the potential for the idioms to be syntactically more loose. Here I give a Chinese example from a dialogue I overheard at the teacher's lounge of my university.
166.A: Zhe4 zhen1shi4 jiao4 zhuan1jia1 die2po4 yan3jing4.
this really make experts shatter glasses
This really was out of the expectations of even the experts.
B: Hai2hao3 wo3 dai4 yin3xin2-yan3jing4...
lucky I wear contact-lenses Lucky I wear contact lenses.
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