Since the general tendencies of present-day English focus more on idiomatic usage, it seems to be worth paying attention to the role phraseological units play in a language. In the field of English phraseology, linguists have shown a constant interest in idioms. Undoubtedly, not only are idioms an important part of the language and culture of the society, but they also carry more impact than non-idiomatic expressions because of their close identification with a particular language and culture. It is difficult to speak or write English without using idioms, especially while describing one’s emotional or mental condition. Therefore, it is interesting and worthwhile to to analyse both the language of phraseological units and emotions. In other words, this book focuses not only on idioms, but also on one’s psychological condition. However, its purpose is neither to discuss the issues of idioms and emotions from the psychological point of view, nor provide a conceptual analysis of emotional metaphors. Instead, the book analyses idioms referring to psychological states in English from the perspective of syntax, focusing particularly both on the syntactic structure of this specific set of verbal psych-idioms, and on the constraints on the way they are built. Therefore, the most current studies, performed within the scope of the Phase Theory and the Idioms as Phases Hypothesis are chosen to address certain syntactic problems that idioms pose.

Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of lexicology/lexicography. The chapters address the status of idioms in recent formal and experimental linguistic theorizing. Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions are written by psycholinguists and theoretical and computational linguists who take mutual advantage of progress in all disciplines. Linguists supply the facts and analyses psycholinguists base their models and experiments on; psycholinguists in turn confront linguistic models with psycholinguistic findings. Computational linguists build natural language processing systems on the basis of models and frameworks provided by theoretical linguists and, sometimes psycholinguists, and set up large corpora to test linguistic hypotheses. Besides the fascination for idioms that make up such a large part of our knowledge of language, interdisciplinarity is one of the attractions of investigations in idiomatic language and language processing.

"The book draws on a lot of research, is friendly to the reader, and will be of good value to teachers." Paul Nation, Victoria University of Wellington, Australia This comprehensive, up-to-date, and accessible text on idiom use, learning, and teaching approaches the topic with a balance of sound theory and extensive research in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics combined with informed teaching practices. Idioms is organized in three parts: Part I includes discussion of idiom definition, classification, usage patterns, and functions. Part II investigates the process involved in the comprehension of idioms and the factors that influence individuals’ understanding and use of idioms in both L1 and L2. Part III explores idiom acquisition and the teaching and learning of idioms, focusing especially on the strategies and techniques used to help students learn idioms. To assist the reader in grasping the key issues, study questions are provided at the end of each chapter. The text also includes a glossary of special terms and an annotated list of selective idiom reference books and student textbooks. Idioms is designed to serve either as a textbook for ESL/applied linguistics teacher education courses or as a reference book. No matter how the book is used, it will equip an ESL/applied linguistics students and professionals with a solid understanding of various issues related to idioms and the learning of them.

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany

This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.

An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory offers beginning students a comprehensive overview of and introduction to our current understanding of the rules and principles that govern the syntax of natural languages. Includes numerous pedagogical features such as 'practice' boxes and sidebars, designed to facilitate understanding of both the 'hows' and the 'whys' of sentence structure Guides readers through syntactic and morphological structures in a progressive manner Takes the mystery out of one of the most crucial aspects of the workings of language – the principles and processes behind the structure of sentences Ideal for students with minimal knowledge of current syntactic research, it progresses in theoretical difficulty from basic ideas and theories to more complex and advanced, up to date concepts in syntactic theory

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a challenge for both the natural language applications and the linguistic theory because they often defy the application of the machinery developed for free combinations where the default is that the meaning of an utterance can be predicted from its structure. There is a rich body of primarily descriptive work on MWEs for many European languages but comparative work is little. The volume brings together MWE experts to explore the benefits of a multilingual perspective on MWEs. The ten contributions in this volume look at MWEs in Bulgarian, English, French, German, Maori, Modern Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. They discuss prominent issues in MWE research such as classification of MWEs, their formal grammatical modeling, and the description of individual MWE types from the point of view of different theoretical frameworks, such as Dependency Grammar, Generative Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Lexicon Grammar.

In 1975, Searle stated that one should speak idiomatically unless there is some good reason not to do so. Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor in 1988 defined an idiomatic expression or construction as something that a language user could fail to know while knowing everything else in the language. Our language is rich in conversational phrases, idioms, metaphors, and general expressions used in metaphorical meaning. These idiomatic expressions pose a particular challenge for Machine Translation (MT), because their translation for the most part does not work literally, but logically. The present book shows how idiomatic expressions can be recognized and correctly translated with the help of a bilingual idiom dictionary (English-German), a monolingual (German) corpus, and morphosyntactic rules. The work focuses on the field of Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT). A theory of idiomatic expressions with their syntactic and semantic properties is provided, followed by the practical part of the book which describes how the hybrid EBMT system METIS-II is able to correctly process idiomatic expressions. A comparison of METIS-II with three commercial systems shows that idioms are not impossible to translate as it was predicted in 1952: “The only way for a machine to treat idioms is—not to have idioms!” This book furnishes plenty of examples of idiomatic phrases and provides the foundation for how MT systems can process and translate idioms by means of simple linguistic resources.

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