Document Type : Research
Authors
1 Ph.D. Candidate of Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
2 Associate Professor of Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Idioms and collocations are part of lexical phrases which are of high importance in lexicography. One of the criteria for distinguishing these two types of phrases from each other is the inflexibility of their constituent elements. Idioms, unlike collocations, are not flexible in terms of word order and are always used in a fixed and specific form. The purpose of the present article was to show firstly whether all Persian idioms are inflexible against syntactic changes or some are flexible; secondly, to indicate how a new lexical phrase is created as a result of converting an idiom into a collocation. To illustrate this phenomenon, a new and practical definition for idioms and collocations, based on syntactic criteria not merely semantic, was provided. According to Construction Grammar, idioms were analyzed based on four syntactic tests: ‘passivization’, ‘clefting’, ‘dislocation’, and ‘interrogation’. Two hundred idioms were collected from two of the most up-to-date and comprehensive sources, namely Farsi Amiyaneh Dictionary (Abolhassan Najafi, 2008) and the two-volume Dictionary of Kenayat-e Sokhan (Hassan Anvari, 2019). Some idioms were flexible to syntactic changes, and behaved similarly to collocations. The flexibility of idioms led to introducing a new definition of these phrases based on syntactic criteria. Thus, such phrases were considered a kind of collocation, not an idiom. The result showed that converting an idiom into a collocation always creates a lexical phrase or lexeme with a new meaning. Finally, a plan was introduced to represent such idioms practically in Persian dictionaries.
Keywords
Main Subjects
- Anvari, H. (2019). Kenayat Sokhan Dictionary (1st ed.) Tehran: Sokhan.
- Atkins, B. T. S. & Rundell, M. (2008). The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. New York: OUP.
- Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Croft, W. (2007). Construction grammar. In D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 463-508). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Dabir-Moghaddan, M. (2020). Linguistics: An Iranian perspective. Tehran: Allameh Tabatabai University Press.
- Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Goldberg, A. (2003). Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(5), 219-224. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00080-9
- Jespersen, O. (1909). A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. London/Copenhagen: George Allan and Unwin/Munksgaard.
- Karimi, S. (1997). Persian complex verbs: idiomatic or compositional? Lexicology, 3(2), 273- 318. https://www.u.arizona.edu/~karimi/publications/Idiomatic%20or%20comp.pdf
- Landau, S. I. (2001). Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. London: Cambridge University Press.
- Mel'čuk, I. (2014). Semantics: From meaning to text. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- Miller, J. (1999). Magnasyntax and syntactic analysis. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 4(2), 7-20. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfla.042.0007
- Moezzipoor, F. (2018). A Discussion on Persian left-dislocation and its theoretical challenges for Role and Reference Grammar. Journal of Linguistic Researches in Linguistics, 2, 45-64. https://doi.org/10.22108/JRL.2019.115388.1308
- Najafi, A. (2008). Farsi Amiyaneh Dictionary (2nd ed.). Tehran: Niloufar.
- Newmeyer, F. (1974). The regularity of idiom behavior. Lingua, 34, 327–342. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(74)90002-3
- Perlmutter, D. & P. Postal. (1977). Toward a universal characterization of passivization, Proceedings of the 3rd annual meeting. Berkeley Linguistic Society. 394-417. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v3i0.2266
- Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, & J. Svartvik. (1985). A contemporary grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
- Radford, A. (2009). Analyzing English Sentences, A Minimalist Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rundell, M. (2007). Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2nd ed.). Oxford: Macmillan Education.
- Safavi, K. (2012). Scattered Writings: The First Book, Semantics. Tehran: Elmi.
- Sanchez, J. & Ott, D. (2020). Dislocations. Language and Linguistics Compass. 14 (9), 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12391
- Schenk, A. (1995). The syntactic behavior of idioms. In Martin Everaert, Erik-Jan van der Linden, André Schenk & Rob Schreuder (eds.), Idioms: Structural and psychological perspectives, 253–271. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum Assoc. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315806501
- Sinclair, J. (2004). Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203594070
- Sornicola, R. (1988). It-clefts and Wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types. Linguistics, 24, 343-379. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4175948
- Toma, B. (2018). The Semantics and Pragmatics of Right Dislocation: Odd thing, that. Undergraduate Research Thesis. The Ohio State University.
- Ward, G. & B. Birner. (1996). A Crosslinguistic Study of Postposing in Discourse. Language and Speech, 39, 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383099603900302