Modification of literal meanings in semantically non-decomposable idioms
Creators
- 1. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M.
- 2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Description
In the literature on idioms, conjunction modification is understood as involving a modifier that does not lexically belong to the idiom at hand, modifying the literal meaning of a noun in that idiom while the idiomatic meaning of the expression as a whole is preserved. The construction relies on the hearer perceiving the idiomatic meaning of the whole and the literal meaning of a part of it simultaneously and in conjunction. We investigate instances of naturally occurring examples of four semantically non-decomposable verb-phrase idioms (two English, two German) whose complements contain such a modifier. We examine the possible interpretations and the contextual conditions of these idiom-modifier combinations. They are particularly interesting instances of one-to-many relations between form and meaning.
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262-Crysmann-2021-8.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Is part of
- 978-3-96110-307-2 (ISBN)
- 10.5281/zenodo.4638824 (DOI)