Understanding Opaque Idioms: A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

Since idioms are indispensable to each language, many linguists carried out researches to explore them. Two views on idioms are dominating: the non-compositional view and the compositional view. Both of them have advantages as well as disadvantages. Employing Sperber and Wilson's framework, this thesis proposes a novel way of looking at the representation and comprehension of idioms, especially opaque idioms, which can solve some of the problems confronted by many current views on idioms and fills the gap of seeing idioms from pragmatic point of view.Both the non-compositional and the compositional view fail to provide effective mechanisms that constrain the idiom comprehension process. To fill this gap, this thesis proposes pragmatic mechanisms of idiom process: optimal relevance and the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure to show how idioms are mentally represented and how opaque ones are comprehended. In terms of the representation of idioms, they are holistic conceptual representations; on the other hand, since the concepts underlying idioms have internal structures, they can be modified semantically or syntactically. Thereby, it can account for both the holism and the flexibility of idioms. As for the comprehension of idioms, in my point of view, all idiom types, despite their degree of compositionality, are acquired and processed by the same cognitive mechanisms and comprehension procedure. Since retrieving the idiomatic meaning from memory is often faster and cheaper than computing the string literally, computation of the phrase from the syntactic composition of word meanings would be avoided whenever possible. In the case of opaque idioms, the meaning communicated by the speaker cannot be directly retrieved from the hearer's lexicon. Thus, understanding them often requires the exploitation of encyclopaedic entries of encoded concepts and of other conceptual assumptions in order to assign some content to the ad hoc concept. Furthermore, since this process is strongly constrained by considerations of relevance, the easier it is for the hearer to access the intended information, the faster he will get to the intended meaning. This view agrees with current accounts of idioms that claim idiomatic meaning is often recovered from the meaning of the individual idiom constituents. However, although constituent word meanings (and context) may play a role in the recovery of the overall idiomatic meaning,...