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

1. Preliminary remarks, aims and key questions

In this paper, we will discuss some of the problems of idiom motivation with regard to its relationship with etymology.ⁱ As is well-known, the synchronic motivation of an idiom often does not coincide with the “true” etymology of that idiom, and sometimes the two can contradict each other. In such cases, the question arises whether it is the synchronic motivation or the etymology that is more important for the functioning of an idiom. This involves examining the external combinatorial restrictions of a given idiom. For any idiom this then becomes the question of whether any such restrictions can be explained by addressing the idiom’s conceptual basis. If so, what are the motivational “bridges”? These could involve how most speakers intuitively construct such bridges (which often takes the f of folk etymology), or it could involve the true etymology of the idiom. Both possibilities are plausible, the latter on the assumption that an idiom’s figurative past may be accessible in the present in the form of traces of an “etymological memory” so that even where speakers do not know the etymology, the idiom is not used in combinatorial surroundings that would violate a historically relevant type of context. The former possibility predicts that speakers use idioms according to the idiom’s personal associations for the speaker, which need not have anything in common with the idiom’s true etymology.

Let us make these proposals more specific. Psycholinguistic and cognitive-semantic research suggests that speakers when processing an idiom map the conceptual domain evoked by the idiom’s lexical structure (source) onto another conceptual domain (target) that underlies that idiom’s lexicalized meaning. The target concept then can be structured according to the structure of the source concept, so that the source can influences the lexicalized meaning (cf. examples in Lakoff 1990). These are more or less plausible hypotheses about the ways in which the motivation can influence the processing of an idiom. It may be that, consequently, such processing can also influence an idiom’s use. The usage of idioms and its relationship to idiom processing can be investigated on the basis of empirical data drawn from sufficiently large text corpora (see Section 4.2 below). That is what will be done in this paper.

Our investigation uses Conventional Figurative Language Theory – CFLT developed by Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen (2005) as an appropriate theoretical framework. Central to this theory is the idea that figurative lexical units (prototypical idioms and conventional figurative one-word metaphors) differ from non-figurative units (i.e. from “normal” words, collocations etc.) in their semantics since their content plane consists not only of the lexicalized meaning of the conventional figurative unit, but also of the linguistically relevant traces of the underlying image. Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen (2009) have developed initial stages of a theory of phraseology, which can be considered a specific implementation of CFLT. The main postulates of CFTL are as follows: idioms are a subset of phrasal lexemes, on the one hand, because of their constitutive characteristics: polylexicality (i.e. they consist of more than one word) and stability (i.e. they are not produced, but reproduced with approximately the same form and meaning). Because of their idiomaticity, on the other hand, idioms have much in common with other figurative units in the lexicon. The prototypical idiom (the figurative idiom) can be interpreted on two different conceptual levels: on a primary level, i.e. on the level of its “literal” meaning which underlies its inner form, and on a second level, i.e. on the level of its figurative meaning. The latter is also called the lexicalized meaning which is the term we use in this paper. The so-called image component of an idiom takes the role of a semantic bridge between the two levels. What is meant by image component is neither the etymology nor the original image, but linguistically relevant traces of an image that are comprehensible for the majority of speakers. It is an additional conceptual link that mediates between the literal reading (fixed in the idiom’s lexical structure) and the lexicalized meaning of an idiom. Cf. similar ideas in (Baranov and Dobrovol’skij 2008).

There are also certain points of intersection between CFLT and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. However, CMT is designed to capture fundamental properties of all possible metaphoric expressions, primarily, novel or dynamic metaphors. This makes CMT not quite adequate for describing idioms or conventional metaphors because conventional figurative expressions are mostly based on different principles. Patrick Hanks (2006: 17) points out “that the distinction between conventional metaphors and literal meanings is less important than the distinction between dynamic metaphors and conventional metaphors. Dynamic metaphors are coined ad hoc to express some new insight; conventional metaphors are just one more kind of normal use of language.” Moreover, many conventional metaphors and idioms are products of their time, so they cannot be accounted for without addressing elements of concrete, basic level images which are mostly culture-specific (cf. also Allan 2006 on this issue).

Motivation, which is the part of the inner form, involves the possibility of interpreting the underlying mental image in a way that makes sense of the meaning conventionally ascribed to it. Thus the conceptual structure of a motivated lexical unit includes not only the lexicalized figurative meaning and the relevant traces of the mental image (i.e. the inner form) but also a conceptual links between them. However, since it is difficult to investigate how individual speakers process a given lexical unit, only trends can be revealed by means of psycholinguistic experiments.ⁱⁱ There are various types of idiom motivation which we will now outline.