Lexicography and Lexicology Reading Group, May 30, 5 pm, 101A

This presentation deals with idiomatic expressions with the lexical component HAND whose motivation consists in metonymy intertwined with metaphor. The project brings out the decomposable nature of body part idioms, and contributes to the recent trend in cognitive linguistics towards explicating metaphorical and metonymic motivation of multiword units (Boers – Lindstromberg 2006).
      The aims of this project are: 1) to specify the metaphor-metonymy interaction in the selected expressions; 2) to identify the most frequent creative modifications that the target items undergo; 3) to establish how modification types affect the motivation of idioms; 4) to investigate whether the most typical formal alternations are reflected in the entries of three paper dictionaries of idioms: Collins Cobuild Idioms Dictionary, Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English; 5) to discover potential new meaning developments of the target items. The four idioms under analysis have been extracted from the EnTenTen corpus of the English language, accessed via the Sketch Engine.
      It is shown that the types of ‘metaphtonymy’ distinguished by Goossens (2002) frequently demonstrate more intricate patterns where cumulative and integrated metaphtonymies are combined. Secondly, the creative occurrences of the HAND idioms in the corpus are grouped into five modification types presented by Stathi (2007). In this project, the scope of analysis is extended in order to take into account other modifiers (e.g. adverbials, genitive forms), apart from adjectives. It turns out that, although contextual modifications do not drastically change the idiom’s motivation type, they do affect the degree of metaphoricity. Last but not least, the occurrences of idioms in the corpus are compared with the definitions and examples in the dictionaries. On the whole, the lexicographic treatment of formal idiom variation tends to reflect the traditional view of idioms as stable multiword units. Some examples of semantic transformations observed in the corpus might become candidates for inclusion in the dictionaries in the form of new senses or subsenses, however, a larger sample of data should confirm the preliminary results of this study.