| This dissertation's thesis is that the study of nonliteral lexemes in English rewards both the scholar interested in applying theories about language and the scholar involved in the development of those theories.;After placing idiom instruction within vocabulary instruction and relating both to the role of meaning in linguistics, the author discusses the concept, idiom. The encyclopedic view of semantics, espoused by cognitive linguistics, is recommended. In it idioms are elements in processes similar to the ontogenetic processes of biological organisms. Among the structural schemas in those processes is a semantic field that includes names of human body parts.;The computer-enabled study reported here focuses on nonliteral expressions that include body-part names because of their utility in ESOL, and because the author believes that further study of such lexemes can contribute to a better understanding of interrelationships between cognition, culture, and language. Forty-five body-part names were discovered in nonliteral expressions. They are ranked by number of occurrences in those expressions. Appendixes show each body-part lexeme in its word-form concordances.;The corpus consisted of scripted and unscripted discourse in the public affairs genre--more than 1,000,000 words transcribed from 113 broadcasts of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Hardware included a Macintosh LC and an Apple OneScanner; software included Calera's Wordscan and two key word in context (KWIC) programs. Those programs were written in MaxSPITBOL by Mark Emmer of Catspaw, Inc.;The work contributes a set of lexemes and concordances to aid in prioritizing American English idiomatic vocabulary for higher-education-bound students of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL). It supports ideas about semantics that are foundational in cognitive linguistics and provides corpora for analyses of such vocabulary. Discussions of the dissertation's purpose, significance, basic concepts, and preparation relate relevant literature to theoretical, descriptive, and pedagogically applied--"educational"--linguistics. |
