Rethinking Idiomaticity A Usage-based Approach

by Wulff, Stefanie

• ISBN13: 9781847064202
• ISBN10: 1847064205
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-02
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Being presented with phrases of the kind, take the plunge and write a letter, native speakers of English tend to agree that the former is more idiomatic that the latter. What exactly is it about these two phrases that guide speakers' judgements? Adopting a usage-based perspective, this study addresses the question 'which factors do speakers rely upon when assessing the idiomaticity of a construction?'. Rethinking Idiomaticity is the first study to bring together a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach and judgement data to explore the nature of idiomaticity as a complex concept that comprises semantic and formal variation parameters. Wulff's fascinating book is suitable for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of lexicography, phraseology, corpus linguistics and those who are employing quantitative approaches. Cognitive linguists interested in the empirical underpinnings of their theoretical assumptions will also find this required reading.

Author Biography

Stefanie Wulff is a Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Theoretical issues	p. 8
Introduction	p. 8
Previous approaches to idioms and idomaticity	p. 8
Discourses analysis and the relevance of phraseological units	p. 10
The collocation-idiom continuum in phraseology	p. 11
Idiomaticity as a multifactorial concept: Psycholinguistic approaches	p. 12
A constructionist approach to idioms and idiomaticity	p. 14
Theoretical underpinnings	p. 14
The role of non-compositionality and frequency	p. 15
A usage-based model	p. 17
Placing idioms in the construction	p. 17
Conclusion	p. 19
Methodological issues	p. 20
Introduction	p. 20
(Quantitative) corpus linguistics	p. 20
Data	p. 23
Preliminary considerations	p. 23
The data sample	p. 25
Experimental data	p. 28
Conclusion	p. 33
Compositionality	p. 35
Introduction	p. 35
Previous approaches	p. 35
Non-compositionality approaches	p. 35
Compositionality approaches	p. 36
Idiomatic pattern typologies	p. 39
Corpus-linguistic / computational approaches	p. 41
Towards a new approach to compositionality	p. 44
A pre-test data sample of VPCs	p. 46
Finding an adequate association measure	p. 47
(Dichotomous) p-values do not reflect (interval-scaled) association strength	p. 50
Verb or particle, is that the question?	p. 52
Interim summary	p. 54
A new approach to compositionality	p. 55
Application	p. 55
Results	p. 59
Conclusion	p. 65
Flexibility measures	p. 67
Introduction	p. 67
Previous approaches	p. 68
Theoretical approaches	p. 68
Psycholinguistic approaches	p. 69
Corpus-linguistic approaches	p. 71
Kinds of flexibility	p. 75
A new approach to flexibility	p. 77
The baseline	p. 77
Measure I: An extension of Barkema (1994a)	p. 78
Measure II: Entropy	p. 82
Measure II, version B: Directional entropy	p. 85
Tree-syntactic flexibility (SF)	p. 87
Application	p. 87
Results	p. 88
Lexico-syntactic flexibility (LF)	p. 91
Application	p. 91
General lexico-syntactic flexibility	p. 94
Flexibility of the NP-slot	p. 98
Flexibility of the verb-slot	p. 107
Morphological flexibility (MF)	p. 116
Application	p. 116
Flexibility of the NP-slot	p. 116
Flexibility of the verb-slot	p. 123
Evaluation	p. 141
Conclusion	p. 145
The idiomatic variation continuum	p. 150
Introduction	p. 150
Method: Principal Component Analysis	p. 150
How idiomatic variation parameters cluster	p. 152
Conclusion	p. 154
The idiomaticity continuum	p. 157
Introduction	p. 157
Method: Multiple regression analysis	p. 157
Assessing the relevance of idiomatic variation parameters for idiomaticity judgements	p. 158
Conclusion	p. 160
Towards a new model of idiomaticity	p. 163
Appendices	p. 170
Example of a questionnaire for the elicitation of perceived idiomaticty data	p. 171
Results for compositionality	p. 173
Barkema-based flexibility values for tree-syntactic, lexico-syntactic and morphological flexibility	p. 176
Entropy-based flexibility values for tree-syntactic, lexico-syntactic and morphological flexibility	p. 186
Barkema-based flexibility values for the parameter levels of tree-syntactic, lexico-syntactic and morphological flexibility	p. 196
An overview of the formal flexibility parameters and their parameter levels with corresponding examples	p. 214
Scatterplots displaying the correlation between the two flexibility measures (Barkema-based = 'B', entropy = 'H')	p. 217
References	p. 227
Author Index	p. 236
Subject Index	p. 238
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