A large-scale corpora investigation into English idiom variants in the domain of anger [通常講演]
Ai Inoue
European Society of Phraseology 2021 2021年09月 口頭発表(一般) Université catholique de Louvain European Society of Phraseology
This study is part of a large phraseological project to find the regularities of how idiom variants are formed. As significant research on idioms has been conducted, idioms’ definitions and targeted idioms vary by study. This study defines idioms as a fixed unit that is semantically opaque or metaphorical or traditionally not the sum of its parts, based on Moon (1998), Fernando and Flavell (1981), and Cowie (1988). Moon (1998: 120ff.) mentions that corpus data show English idioms’ forms are often unstable and introduce their lexical variations or strongly institutionalised transformations despite fixedness being a key property of English idioms. Notably, some English idioms are more fixed than others, and some such as take place do not vary at all; however, variation is highly widespread in English idioms.
For example, Inoue (2018) shows that semantically similar idioms and phrasal verbs, for example, take care of, look after, and care for, are blended into the variants take care for, take care about, and care of, respectively, which merge the verbal function of care and the substantial function of care by using a corpus-based approach. Inoue (2018) concludes that care remains in the variants, changing its part of speech, because care is the most important component in them. Also, Inoue (2019) quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrates the transition from the traditional, transitive usage of the existing collocation, make somebody angry/mad to the intransitive utilisation of a collocation, make angry/mad. Inoue (2018, 2019) reveal that existing linguistic theories and rules account only for a small part of English usage, most of which evidences numerous uses beyond normative theories and rules. From a phraseological perspective, it is safe to assert that resurgent or newly observed idioms or collocations formed by semantically similar idioms or collocations become ubiquitous regardless of their grammatical functions.
However, a drawback is observed in Inoue (2018, 2019) and other research on idiom variants: they did not explain how idiom variants were formed. Other than the variation in English idioms, Clausén (1996) reports idiom variants with respect to Swedish, and Cignoni and Coffey (1995) with respect to Italian. No persuasive research on how idiom variants are formed has been conducted. Thus, this study aims to show if idiom variants are not arbitrarily formed by drawing data from databases of tens of millions of words such as Davies (2018), BNC, and WordBanksOnline.
There are several colourful idioms that mean that someone has become very angry and lost control in English such as blow a fuse, hit the roof, lose your rag, have/throw a fit, lose one’s temper, etc. This study focuses on these commonly used idioms and then demonstrates the variants of the idioms within the framework of Corpus Pattern Analysis (i.e., sound empirical footing). The data reveal that idiom variants are classified into two types: The first includes those formed due to only syntactic replacements (i.e., replaced by synonymous components) without causing any semantic change to the original idioms. The idiom variants belonging to this type can be subdivided on the basis of the syntactic ways in which idioms vary. The second comprises semantically different idioms variants from original idioms due to the synonymous alternation of a component. This study also aims to explain a subconsciously used principle that helps form idiom variants.