Yp1-03(2) Idioms: Motivation and Etymology Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij and Elisabeth Piirainen Abstract

5. Summary

Most idioms are motivated in some way. The study of idiom motivation is an important linguistic issue because motivation may influence the way an idiom is used. Motivation is neither a purely psychological nor an etymological phenomenon. The motivational basis of an idiom consists of linguistically relevant traces of the underlying image rather than of the image itself. Some of these traces are part of the conceptual basis of the idiom. This kind of image trace makes up the so-called image component of idiom semantics, and, in this sense, they are part of the content plane of the idiom. As for etymology, it rarely forms the motivational basis of an idiom. But as our case study shows, there are occasional cases where it may. Sometimes idioms are motivated by the knowledge of texts that served as the idioms’ origin sources, i.e. by factors of intertextuality. However, speakers are mostly not aware of these textual sources, i.e. intertextuality is a part of an idioms’ etymological description, rather than a relevant motivational factor. Idioms which have textual sources are perceived as motivated only because speakers address their metaphoric or symbolic basis, i.e. speakers interpret the underlying concept that is fixed in the metaphor or in the cultural symbol contained in the lexical structure of the idiom and correlate the results of their interpretation with the lexicalized meaning of the idiom. This does not mean that the true etymology of an idiom may not play any role in linguistic research. First, it is a significant task to compare the true etymology with the synchronically relevant motivational basis. And second, in the case of some idioms “etymological memory” (compare Section 4.2) may have a role to play in motivation. In these cases, a given idiom may exhibit restrictions on its use that can only be explained by addressing its history, i.e. these idioms cannot be used in contexts that are not compatible with their etymological origins.

Notes

i We use the term idiom in the European tradition: The consensus is here that idioms are the central and most irregular group of phrasemes. For the discussion of idiom motivation see among others: Vinogradov 1947; Burger et al. 1982; Gréciano 2002; Dobrovol’skij 1995, 1997, 2007: 790–795; Burger 2007a; Burger 2007b; Baranov and Dobrovol’skij 2008.

ii For results of psycholinguistic experiments on idiom processing compare overview papers, such as Häcki Buhofer 2007; Gibbs and Colston 2007; Skoufaki 2009.

iii There are also a few minor motivation types (e.g. so-called kinetic idioms, play on words or indexal motivation); for more detail, see Langlotz 2006: 120–170; Burger 1976, 2007a: 62–67, 2007b: 101; Burger et al. 1982: 56–60; Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 2005: 87–101, 2009: 19–38.

iv For the discussion of this term in the phraseological literature see among others Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 1997, 2005, 2009; Piirainen 1998; Burger 2007b: 93–94; Ďurčo 2007: 731–732; Dobrovol’skij 2007: 794–795.

v On the notion of semantic analyzability or decomposability of idioms cf. Rajxštejn 1980; Dobrovol’skij 1982, 2004, 2007; Nunberg et al. 1994; Langlotz 2006; Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 2009: 43–60.

vi Phraseology researchers use it with different meanings, often in the sense of interdiscursivity. For example, Burger 1991 applies it to the availability of pre-fabricated text fragments (aphorisms, slogans, book titles etc.) and their interweaving in a text. See also Piirainen 2005, 2010: 17–22.

vii These depictions have often been discussed in works on history of painting; for an overview see Metken 1996; Jaritz 1997.

viii Similar experiences are reported by Yu (1995: 161–163) when he attempted to confirm the well-known anger is heat metaphors by means of the large Bank of English corpus. Various metaphoric expressions turned out to be rare or did not occur at all in the corpus.

ix In the text corpora it appears, for the main part, in newspaper sport reports on football and similar kinds of sport where it is used in the sense of ‘to be winning, superior to the opponent’, chiefly said about the teams and clubs. These texts do not help answering the question whether the idiom is gender-restricted or not. In everyday language, the meaning of the idiom is close to that of idiom (19a,b).

x The exhaustive description of an idiom should include its motivating links as well as an etymological comment. Langacker (2005) points to the fact that dictionaries should make it clear that lexemes give access to domains of independent knowledge, instead of just providing a concise definition.