The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 74 pdf

(12) a. built like a truck
b. like getting blood out of a stone
c. stick out like a sore thumb
d. work like a dog
Most metonymic idioms relate to parts of the body. The particular body part
mentioned represents the whole person and foregrounds the physical sense or
ability which constitutes the central part of the idiom’s figurative meaning. For
example, lend an ear indicates both the person and his/her attention, and get one’s
head round something indicates a person and his/her mind or understanding. Some
further examples are in (13):
(13) a. hate someone’s guts
b. have an eye on something
c. lend a hand
d. lose one’s nerve
e. under someone’s thumb
For the above expressions, the relationship between metonymic tenor and meto-
nymic vehicle is often governed by physiology and the real world. Sense organs
denote their respective senses, and formulaic phrases mentioning hands, for ex-
ample, generally have meanings to do with holding and manipulating (Ko
¨
vecses
and Szabo
´
1996). In other cases, the relationship is culturally determined. By con-
vention, heart, as in to lose heart, indicates emotions and depth of feeling, and nerve,
as in to lose one’s nerve, refers to audacity or bravery.
Other metonymic idioms involve objects and places that represent actions, ac-
tivities, or results or involve other part and whole relationships. For the most part,
these referents are also often culture specific. Consider the following cases:
(14) a. at the helm/wheel
b. from the cradle to the grave

c. set sail
d. take the floor
e. without a stitch on
Hyperbolic idioms describe literally impossible processes or attributes, with the
aim of intensifying our understanding of the main idea or event a speaker refers to.
These include expressions like the following:
(15) a. a storm in a teacup
b. breathe fire
c. jump down someone’s throat
d. shoot the breeze
e. sweat blood
f. tie oneself into knots
g. raining cats and dogs
700 raymond w. gibbs, jr.
Many idioms suggest exaggerations and implausibilities, rather than actual impos-
sibilities. Consider the following examples:
(16) a. be paved with gold
b. be rolling in the aisles
c. cost an arm and an leg
d. chilled to the bone
e. stink to high heaven
Truisms form another group of idiomatic phrases. These expressions state the
obvious, and achieve their rhetorical effect through understatement. These are
completely truthful but must be interpreted in the light of what is implied in the
vehicle of their metaphors. Consider the following cases:
(17) a. cannot hear oneself think
b. not a spring chicken
c. not hold water
d. not someone’s cup of tea
e. won’t set the world on fire

Finally, a few formulas are always used ironically. The mismatch between
surface and intended meaning can be seen as a kind of metaphoricity in which the
concrete terms in the idiom are metaphorically mapped onto the situation at hand,
usually with ironic effect. Consider the following examples:
(18) a. big deal
b. God’s gift to
c. take the cake
d. tell me about it
e. need something like a hole in the head
The prominence of different figurative schemes in many idioms and related
forms provides one source of evidence in favor of the claim that people readily
conceptualize human events and abstract ideas via metaphor, metonymy, irony,
and other tropes.
3. Why Speak Idiomatically?

The thousands of idioms and proverbs listed in contemporary dictionaries, which
do not include any other speech formulas, suggests that these phrases make up an
important part of the language (for example, see the Longman Dictionary of En-
glish Idioms 1979, and the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English 1993). But
why do people speak and write idiomatically? Similar to traditional reasons for
idioms and formulaic language 701
employing metaphor, people use idioms to be polite, to avoid responsibility for
the import of what is communicated, to express ideas that are difficult to commu-
nicate using literal language, and to express thoughts in a compact and vivid
manner (Ortony 1975; Gibbs 1994). For instance, consider the following formulaic
phrases where the lexical meaning diverges from the idiomatic interpretation
(adapted from Moon 1998).
(19) lexical reference idiomatic reference
break the ice action verbal
fit the bill action attributive

go up in smoke event existential
jog someone’s memory action cognition
lose one’s heart action affection
run out of steam event attributive
throw in the towel action event
In each case here, a speaker uses an idiomatic phrase to effectively communicate
in an indirect manner a subjective opinion under the guise of stating a more
objective physical situation. Speaking in this way communicates an interpreta-
tion and evaluation of the situation that the speaker refers to when employing
an idiom.
Idiomatic language, in other cases, enables speakers to remind listeners of other
related contexts to communicate relevant beliefs in the present situation. Many
pithy phrases drawn from films, television, politics, and journalism become insti-
tutionalized as part of contemporary culture (e.g., American presidential candidate
in 1984, Walter Mondale, asking then President Ronald Reagan with regard to his
budget proposals Where’s the beef?, which echoed a statement made in a popular
hamburger-chain television commercial). This establishment of idioms in con-
temporary American culture is evident in still well-understood phases such as the
following (Moon 1998):
(20) a. And now for something completely different
b. Go ahead, make my day
c. I’ll be back
d. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship
More generally, formulaic language is important to social interaction for ma-
nipulating others, asserting separate identity, and asserting group identity (Wray
and Perkins 2000). Thus, knowing the right familiar phrase, such as slang, to use
in some situation is critical to marking a speaker as having the right status to be
considered a valued member of some community.
Using idioms and other speech formulas also has important cognitive benefits,
especially in providing mental shortcuts in both language production and com-

prehension. A speaker may easily retrieve a phrase like John flew off the handle when
he saw the messy kitchen to express in an indirect way a very vivid image of John
getting angry (Gibbs and O’Brien 1990). Listeners will readily infer the complex
702 raymondw.gibbs,jr.
figurative meanings of the phrase flew off the handle because of their familiarity with
this expression (Gibbs 1992). People readily interpret the figurative meanings of
idioms faster than they do either paraphrases or literal uses of the same expres-
sions (Gibbs 1980). For this reason, formulaic language is a means of ensuring the
physical and social survival of the individual through communication, on the one
hand, and a way of avoiding processing overload, on the other.
Idioms may have several organizational functions in discourse (Moon 1998).
For instance, idioms are thought to be excellent ways of signaling topic transition
in conversation. Consider the following excerpt from a conversation between a
daughter and her mother where they talked about the death of someone they both
knew (adapted from Drew and Holt 1995: 123):
(21) Leslie: The vicar’s warden, anyways, he died suddenly this week, and he
was still working.
Mum: Good grace.
Leslie: He was seventy-nine.
Mum: My word.
Leslie: Yes, he was.
Mum: You’ve got’s real workers down there.
Leslie: He was a, uh. Yes. Indeed, he was a buyer for the only horse hair
factory left in England.
Mum: Good grace.
Leslie: He was their buyer. So he had a good innings, didn’t he?
Mum: I should say so. Yes. Marvelous.
Leslie: Anyways, we had a very good evening on Saturday.
When Leslie says he had a good innings (an idiomatic allusion describing a bats-
man’s successful performance in a cricket match), she not only summarizes the

information presented in her prior turn (e.g., he was a buyer for the only horse hair
factory left in England), but refers to the whole theme of the conversation up to that
point (e.g., that the vicar’s warden was still working at age seventy-nine when he
died). Leslie’s description of the vicar’s warden’s life metaphorically as a good
innings refers to a more abstract, general idea than if she had simply stated that ‘he
had a good life’ (e.g., that his life was long and very productive). Thus, the idiom
acts to thematically summarize the information revealed in the conversation and
allows speakers to move on to the next conversational topic. Idioms are especially
useful in terminating a topic because of their distinctive manner of characterizing
abstract themes in concrete ways.
Another example of how idioms provide textual coherence is seen in the fol-
lowing case where a speaker develops an image using the proverb Don’t put the cart
before the horse when talking about British economic problems (from The Guardian
of July 1990, as cited in Moon 1998: 126):
To regard savings as the animating force in this scheme of things is to put the
cart before the horse. The horse is the growth of national income, propelled by the
level of spending, the harness linking horse and cart the financial system, and
idioms and formulaic language 703
bringing up the rear is the cart of saving. The horse is larger the greater the
level of investment, and the larger the horse the larger the cart of savings it can
support.
The writer here uses the surface image of putting a horse before a cart to draw out
various entailments of the analogy between the proverb and the financial situation
in England. In this way, the author uses a common expression or parts of this
phrase, with figurative meaning to provide coherence to his complex argument
about an abstract topic.
Beyond these various pragmatic reasons for employing idioms and formulas in
speech and writing, people speak idiomatically because they conceptualize of many
ideas and events, particularly human ones, in terms of metaphor and metonymy. I
will argue in a later section that the study of idioms, in fact, provides a significant

source of evidence showing the fundamental figurative character of many aspects
of human thought.
4. Are Idioms Really Fixed
Expressions?

The widely held view of idioms is that these phrases are ‘‘noncompositional,’’ or
‘‘fixed,’’ and that their meanings must be directly stipulated in the mental lexicon in
the same way that the meanings of individual words are listed in a dictionary (see
Sinclair 1991). Unlike comprehension of literal language, idioms are presumably
understood in one of several ways: (i) through the retrieval of their stipulated
meanings from the lexicon after their literal meanings have been rejected as inap-
propriate (Weinreich 1969; Bobrow and Bell 1973); (ii) in parallel to processing of
their literal meanings (Swinney and Cutler 1979); (iii) directly without any analysis
of their literal meanings (Gibbs 1980, 1986); or (iv) when there has been significant
input to recognize a configuration as an idiom (Cacciari and Tabossi 1988; Tabossi
and Zardon 1993). Experimental studies show that (iii) and (iv) provide the best
descriptions of how idioms are understood (Gibbs 1994). Many computational
models of natural language processing include a special ‘‘phrasal’’ lexicon con-
taining idiomatic and formulaic phrases that are noncompositional, but which can
be quickly accessed during linguistic parsing (Becker 1975; Wilensky and Arens
1980; Gasser and Dyer 1986; see also Jackendoff 1995).
Scholars often treat idioms as ‘‘dead’’ metaphors. The classic case of kick the
bucket seems to illustrate the idea that the phrase may have been at one time
metaphorical but has lost its metaphoricity over time (actually, this phrase has a
metonymic origin). To some extent, there are idioms that appear ‘‘dead’’ in this
704 raymondw.gibbs,jr.
way (although even kick the bucket seems somewhat analyzable in that it refers to
sudden, and not prolonged, death, primarily due to the influence of kick; see
Hamblin and Gibbs 1999).
But this traditional view of idiomaticity confuses dead metaphors with con-

ventional ones. Deciding whether an idiom is dead or just unconsciously conven-
tional requires, among other things, a search for its systematic manifestation in the
language as a whole and in our everyday reasoning patterns. For instance, consider
the following list of conventional expressions:
(22) a. Look how far we’ve come.
b. It’s been a long, bumpy road.
c. We’re at a crossroads.
d. We may have to go our separate ways.
e. Our marriage is on the rocks.
f. We’re spinning our wheels.
These (and other) conventional expressions cluster together under one of the basic
metaphorical system of understanding: love is a journey (Lakoff and Johnson
1980). This conceptual metaphor involves a tight mapping according to which
entities in the domain of love (e.g., the lovers, their common goals, the love re-
lationship, etc.) correspond systematically to entities in the domain of a journey
(e.g., the traveler, the vehicle, destinations, etc.). Various inferences or entailments
arise when we think of love as a journey. Among these are the inferences that
the person in love is a traveler, the goal of ultimate love is a destination, the means
for achieving love are routes, the difficulties one experiences in love are obstacles to
travel, and the progress in a love relationship is the distance traveled.
Classic idioms also are systematically related. Consider the following phrases:
(23) a. blow your stack
b. hot the ceiling
c. flip your lid
These phrases arise from the widespread conceptual metaphor anger is heated
fluid in a container, which also underlies quasi-idiomatic phrases such as
blow up and flipped out. Not all idioms for anger are motivated by the concep-
tual metaphor anger is heated fluid in a container. Thus, jump down some-
one’s throat appears to be related to anger is animal behavior. In this way, there
are often several metaphorical ways of conceptualizing a single abstract concept,

such as ‘anger’. But the point here is that there are plenty of basic conventional
metaphors that are alive, certainly enough to show that what is conventional and
fixed need not be dead (Lakoff and Turner 1989). Part of the problem with the
traditional view of idioms stems from its inability to account for contemporary
speakers’ metaphorical schemes of thought. For this reason, the traditional view
simply cannot explain why so many idioms make sense to speakers in having the
figurative meanings they do.
idioms and formulaic language 705
5. Analyzability of Idioms

The fact that many idioms may arise from enduring conceptual metaphors pro-
vides one reason why these phrases are not simple fixed or frozen expressions
whose meanings are opaque to contemporary speakers. An important extension of
this idea is the fact that many idiomatic phrases appear to be decomposable or
analyzable with the meanings of their parts contributing independently to their
overall figurative meanings (Gibbs and Nayak 1989; Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow
1994; Titone and Connine 1999). For instance, in the phrase pop the question,it
is easy to discern that the noun question refers to a marriage proposal when the
verb pop is used to refer to the manner of uttering it. Similarly, the noun law in lay
down the law refers to the rules of conduct in certain situations when the verb
phrase laying down is used to refer to the act of invoking the law. Idioms such as
pop the question, spill the beans, and lay down the law are ‘‘decomposable’’ because
each of their components obviously contributes to their overall figurative inter-
pretations.
Other idioms whose individual parts do not contribute individually to the
figurative meaning of the idiom are semantically ‘‘nondecomposable’’ (e.g., kick the
bucket, shoot the breeze) because people experience difficulty in breaking these
phrases into their component parts (Gibbs and Nayak 1989; Nunberg, Sag, and
Wasow 1994).
The analyzability of an idiom does not depend on that word string being lit-

erally well-formed (Gibbs and Nayak 1989). For instance, pop the question is literally
anomalous but semantically decomposable. All that matters for an idiom to be
viewed as decomposable is for its parts to have meanings, either literal or figurative,
that contribute independently to the phrase’s overall figurative interpretation.
The analyzability of an idiom is really a matter of degree depending on the
salience of its individual parts. For instance, many speakers view the phrase fall off
the wagon as being less decomposable than pop the question because the meaning
that fall contributes to fall off the wagon is not as salient as the meaning that pop
contributes to pop the question. When speakers judge that the idiom let off steam is
analyzable or decomposable, they are essentially finding some relationship between
the components let off and steam with their figurative referents ‘release’ and ‘anger’
(Moon 1998). It is not surprising that speakers find some relationship between the
noun steam and the concept of ‘anger’ because anger is metaphorically under-
stood in terms of heat and internal pressure (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
Furthermore, the parts of some idioms are more understandable than others
and so their metaphoricity is not evenly spread across an entire phrase (Gibbs 1994;
Moon 1998). For example, rock the boat is a transparent metaphor, but rock has an
analogous metaphorical meaning ‘upset’ that is seen apart from idiomatic phrases.
Thus, verbs such as move, agitate, shake, and stir systematically have meanings to do
with physical movement and metaphorical meanings to do with emotional dis-
turbance. Similarly, the metaphor of spill in spill the beans is simpler than that of
706 raymondw.gibbs,jr.
beans. That is, it is easier to draw an analogy between the action of spilling some-
thing physically and that of revealing a secret (compare let slip or drop as in drop
something into a conversation and spill one’s guts) than it is to draw an analogy be-
tween beans and secret (but see Gibbs and O’Brien 1990). Thus, beans seems more
metaphorical than spill and thus the idiom is asymmetrically metaphorical.
Finally, the meanings of an idiom’s parts may be shaped by that phrase’s overall
figurative meaning. For instance, Geeraerts (1995) describes reinterpreation pro-
cesses in which the parts of various Dutch idioms take on new meanings as a result

of their being used in idiomatic expressions. To take an English example, the word
spill now conventionally means ‘reveal’ from its participation in the idiom phrase
spill the beans. In fact, many dictionaries now see ‘reveal’ as one of the primary
senses of spill. As Geeraerts argues, semantic interpretation does not always operate
in a strict bottom-up manner (going from literal to figurative meaning), but in-
volves top-down processes as well (where figurative meanings shape literal ones).
This possibility raises additional problems for the presumed primacy of literal
meaning in linguistic interpretation (see Gibbs 1994). For the moment, though, the
influence of figurative phrasal meaning on the meanings of an idiom’s parts shows
how idiom analyzability is not strictly grounded in lexical meaning apart from how
words are actually used in idioms.
A series of psychological experiments revealed that there is reasonable consis-
tency in college students’ intuitions of the analyzability of idioms (Gibbs and Nayak
1989). Participants in these studies were simply asked to rate the degree to which the
individual words in idioms contribute independently to these phrases’ overall fig-
urative interpretations. These American speakers generally see some idiomatic
phrases, such as pop the question, miss the boat, and button your lips, as highly
analyzable or decomposable, and judge other phrases as semantically nondecom-
posable, such as kick the bucket and shoot the breeze. A third group of idioms was
identified as being decomposable, but abnormally so, because their individual
components have a different relationship to their idiomatic referents than do
‘‘normally’’ decomposable idioms. For example, we can identify the figurative
referent in the idiom carry a torch only by virtue of our knowledge of torches as
conventional metaphors for descriptions of warm feelings. This abnormally de-
composable idiom differs from normally decomposable idioms, such as button your
lips, whose components have a more direct relation to their figurative referents.
6. Syntactic Behavior of Idioms

The traditional noncompositional view of idioms supposedly explains why many
idioms tend to be syntactically unproductive or frozen. For example, one cannot

syntactically transform the phrase John kicked the bucket to a passive construction
idioms and formulaic language 707
(i.e., *The bucket was kicked by John) without disrupting its nonliteral meaning.
Linguists have suggested a variety of formal devices that can predict the syntactic
behavior of idioms (Weinreich 1969; Chafe 1970; Fraser 1970; Katz 1973; Newmeyer
1974; Bresnan 1982; Gazdar et al. 1985). For example, one proposal argued that
idioms can be organized into a ‘‘frozenness hierarchy,’’ ranging from expressions
which undergo nearly all grammatical transformations without losing their figu-
rative meanings (e.g., lay down the law) to those idioms that cannot undergo even
the most simple transformations without losing their idiomatic interpretations
(e.g., face the music) (Fraser 1970). According to this analysis, idioms can be marked
with a single feature that assigns them to a class of those idioms which behave
similarly in the operation of their syntactic rules. Another proposal suggests that
some of the constituents of unproductive idioms be marked with syntactic features
which block the application of transformations to strings that contain the constit-
uent (Katz 1973). Thus, the idiomatic phrase breathe down your neck can be lexically
marked as [–Particle Movement, –Passive, –Action Nominalization] to prevent the
generation of unacceptable strings such as *I breathed your neck down the other day.
A more recent proposal suggests that idioms are subject to different grammatical
principles that limit their forms. For instance, O’Grady (1998) argues in favor of the
‘‘continuity constraint,’’ which states that an idiom’s component parts must form a
chain of head-to-head relations. Thus, basic idioms are phrases like see stars and lose
face, which consist of a verb and the head of its theme complement (stars and face,
respectively). This constraint explains why some idiom patterns do not exist (i.e.,
those that cannot be reduced to a continuous chain of head-to-head relations, such
as verb plus genitive, subject plus object, and verb plus object of a preposition). To
give one example, there should be no idioms like A wolf in sheep’s clothing V a son of
a gun, because there is no licensing relation holding between the heads of subject
and a direct object.
Unfortunately, none of these syntactic accounts explains how people come to

acquire the rules for knowing which transformations or constraints apply or do not
apply to which idioms (Ruwet 1991; Gibbs 1994; Nunberg, Wasow, and Sag 1994).
Speakers are not explicitly taught which idioms, and other formulaic phrases, are
syntactically productive and which are not. Yet people somehow learn about the
syntactic behavior of most idioms, including relatively rare and novel phrases. So
how do speakers determine, for instance, that the noun bucket of the syntactically
frozen phrase kick the bucket is understood with the feature [þIdiom] to block
application of the passive transformation (we never hear *The bucket was kicked by
John as an idiom), while the noun law of the syntactically productive idiom lay
down the law is not marked with such a feature? Certainly, we have never heard The
bucket was kicked by John as an idiom, but we do not need to hear The piper was paid
by John in order to produce John paid the piper or to recognize the expression as
idiomatic (Gibbs 1994).
The data showing that people can differentiate between idioms based on their
semantic analyzability has important implications for explaining the syntactic be-
havior of idioms. One hypothesis examined in several psychological studies was
708 raymondw.gibbs,jr.
that people’s intuitions about the syntactic versatility of idioms are affected by
the analyzability or decomposability of these figurative phrases (Gibbs and Nayak
1989). In fact, the results of these studies supported this prediction. Normally de-
composable idioms (e.g., pop the question) were found to be much more syntac-
tically productive than semantically nondecomposable idioms (e.g., chew the fat).
Abnormally decomposable idioms were not found to be syntactically productive
because each part does not by itself refer to some component of the idiomatic
referent, but only to some metaphorical relation between the individual part and
the referent.
These findings suggest that the syntactic versatility of idioms is not an arbitrary
phenomenon, perhaps due to unknown historical reasons (Cutler 1982), but can at
least partially be explained in terms of an idiom’s semantic analyzability (Nunberg,
Sag, and Wasow 1994). The syntactic versatility of other formulaic language, in-

cluding verb particle constructions (Bolinger 1971; Lindner 1981) and binomial
expressions (Lambrecht 1984) can also be explained by appeal to the internal se-
mantics of these phrases. For example, if the particle in verb particle constructions,
such as make up and put out, has little meaning on its own, then it is difficult to
move that particle to a position of semantic focus (Bolinger 1971). Thus, while it is
permissible to say Fifty states make up the United States, it is not reasonable to say
*Fifty states make the United States up because the postposed particle up carries
little meaning by itself and cannot be used in the sentence’s final position.
Part of the reason why idioms may exhibit certain constraints on their syn-
tactic productivity is rooted in broader generalizations about language and con-
ceptual processes. This possibility is taken up in a later section on idiom schemas.
7. Lexical Flexibility of Idioms

Idioms and formulaic phrases exhibit tremendous lexical variation (Gibbs et al.
1989; Moon 1998: Glucksberg 2001). For instance, the main verbs in many idioms
can be changed without disrupting these phrases’ figurative meanings, as seen in
the following examples (see Moon 1998):
(24) a. set/start the ball rolling
b. throw/toss in the towel
c. lower/let down one’s guard
d. step into/fill someone’s shoes
e. play/keep one’s cards close to the chest
f. throw/put someone off the scent
Nouns can also vary in many idioms without disrupting their figurative meanings.
Consider the following pairs of expressions:
idioms and formulaic language 709