A Relevance-theoretic Approach To The Study Of Idioms And Idiom Variants

Since idioms are indispensable to each language, many linguists have carried out researches to explore them. There seems to be two dominating views on idioms: the non-compositional view and the compositional view. Both of them have advantages as well as disadvantages. Employing Sperber and Wilson's framework, this paper proposes a novel way of looking at the representation and comprehension of idioms and idiom variants, which can resolve some of the problems confronted by many current views on idioms.First, in terms of the representation of idioms, the non-compositional view holds that idioms are represented in mental lexicon as lexical items with no internal structure; while the compositional view contends that idioms have a distributed representation. Their weaknesses are evident: the former is unable to account for the wide existence of idiom variants, that is, the flexibility of idioms; the latter does not regard them as holistic conceptual representation, that is, the holism of idioms. An adequate approach to idioms needs to account not only for their flexibility, but also for their holism. The relevance-theoretic approach achieves this goal. It contends that idioms are represented as structured conceptual units. On the one hand, they are seen as holistic conceptual representations; on the other hand,they can be modified semantically or syntactically, asthe concepts underlying idioms have internal structures. Thereby, it is able to account for the two aspects of idioms.Second, with respect to the comprehension of idioms, the non-compositional view claims that since the constituent word meanings have nothing to do with the figurative meaning of the idiom, the whole idiomatic meaning is retrieved directly from the mental lexicon; while the compositional view holds that the constituent word meanings do contribute to its figurative meaning, therefore, idioms are processed literally in the same way as non-idiom strings. The disadvantage of the non-compositional view is that it denies the role of the constituent word meanings in understanding idioms, thus it is unable to account for the comprehension of idiom variants. The defect of the compositional view lies in the fact that a compositional analysis of idioms is not all that is involved in idiom comprehension, because the hearer sometimes needs to retrieve idioms as chunks. Configuration hypothesis, the most compelling account of idioms that has been proposed so far, presents a typology of idioms regarding their degree of compositionality, and suggests at least three different ways to analyze different types of idioms: one deals with pure idioms, another deals with semi-idioms and literal idioms, and the last deals with quasi-metaphorical idioms. However, one might wonder whether idioms and idiom variants are really understood in such a range of ways.The relevance-theoretic approach has a more explicable power in the fact that it can benefit not only the comprehension of idioms, but also the comprehension of idiom variants. In addition, despite their degree of compositionality, the comprehension of idioms and idiom variants is achieved through the same processing mechanisms as the comprehension of non-idiom strings, that is, optimal relevance and the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. Thereby, this approach simplifies the ways of processing different types of idioms.Upon hearing a familiar idiom, the hearer directly retrieves it from the mental lexicon. When encountering an unfamiliar idiom, the hearer realizes that the linguistically encoded meaning and the communicated meaning of the string differ from each other. In order to understand it, he sets up an ad hoc concept of this string, and tries to assign some content to the concept. The process would go like this: following a path of least effort, he starts considering, in order of accessibility, the logical and encyclopaedic information of the ad hoc concept that is highly activated in such context to make...