Characteristics Of Idioms

Idioms can be considered as puzzles because there are no studies that provide a comprehensive analysis of them. Also, it is due to the characteristics that will be described below. They are against the logical structure of the discourse in which “the meanings of the utterances depend on the meanings of their parts and on the syntactic relation among those parts” (Johnson-Laird 1993). This factor gives idioms a heterogeneous character, and describes them as very complex linguistic configurations. Since some expressions have both a literal and an idiomatic meaning, for instance, it's better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick, and others have only an idiomatic interpretation, such as pull the strings, idioms are transparent to native speakers

This depends on their degree of compositionality as, the more compositional an idiom, the more willing it is to be altered. Considering a non-compositional idiom like pull the strings, it is possible to say that if their lexical constituents are modified the idiomatic meaning is lost, for instance, the idiomatic meaning was ‘to be in control’ but if the second constituent is changed by rope, such as pull the rope, this phrase loses its idiomatic meaning and remains only its literal meaning. In conclusion, word substitution is not acceptable. The main reason that causes the failure is that the component words of non-compositional idioms do not map onto the idiom's meaning except in the most general of ways, that is to say, there are no interpretable relations between a substituted word and the original. Contrary to the definition of idioms as dead metaphors that are non compositional in meaning, it is possible to say that idioms are alive because they are partially compositional and their rich figurative meanings are motivated by the world knowledge that people have of the domains to which idioms

In other words, they claimed that the figurative meaning of an idiom was retrieved before its literal meaning. In turn, this will mean that idioms were regarded as lexicalised constructions, and thence they must allow for direct meaning retrieval. In accordance with this view, idioms could be regarded as any other lexical units, therefore being treated as long words. In spite of this view, idioms have a syntactic structure that does not behave like actual words. Glucksberg (1993) states that idioms can be frozen or even very flexible, allowing for a variety of modifications, all in regards to the relation between an idiom figurative and literal