The syntax of English idioms: Can the dog be put on?
Tóm tắt
An idiom is a collection of words whose meaning as a whole cannot be determined from the meanings of the individual words. As such, idioms pose a problem for the psychological process of interpretation, but psychologists have shown interpretation of idioms to be fast. A hallmark of idioms is their resistance to syntactic variation, and some idioms are more resistant than others. Idioms that are low in resistance are termedflexible, and they tend to be more familiar to users of the language, combinedr=.401, combinedp=.02. Some syntactic variations are moredisruptive than others are, and the disruptiveness of variations agrees well with a prediction by Fraser (1970), combinedr=.897,p<.01. Furthermore, 86% of the judgments of the acceptability of 41 idioms in 7 to 8 syntactic variations by 103 Harvard undergraduates agree with a strong proposal by Fraser (1970) that if a particular syntactic variation of an idiom is acceptable, then all relevant variations equally or more disruptive are also acceptable. The localization of the 14% disagreement in either competence or performance will have considerable implications for cognitive psychology and linguistics.
Tài liệu tham khảo
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