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Substitution as a Means of Producing Context-Specific Meaning of an Idiom
Abstract
The paper discusses the use of idioms in British newspapers focusing particularly on the substitution of components aimed at producing context-specific idiomatic meaning. An idiom is a relatively stable (both grammatically and semantically), cohesive, conventionally fixed string of words with completely or partially figurative meaning, which is not a combination of a verb and an adverbial or prepositional particle and which is not longer than a sentence [1]. An idiom is a relatively stable unit of language because it is possible to introduce both structural and semantic variations both synchronically and diachronically. The study addresses substitution of components in idioms in the synchronic aspect only. Substitution of one or more components of idioms is one of those idiom variations in discourse that makes it more challenging for a reader to recall the base forms of idioms and thus perceive the intended meaning. The results of the statistical analysis of the corpus of the instances of idiom use in British newspapers testify to the fact that substitution as a pattern of idiom variation in newspaper discourse is not very productive: within the corpus of the idiom uses in newspaper discourse we have encountered 113 extracts (11, 3 % out of the whole corpus) containing idioms that have been subjected to substitution. The study is based on the approach to the study of idiom use in discourse developed by Naciscione [2,3] and the model of idiom analysis proposed by Langlotz [4], according to which discoursal idiom variations may be based on literal scene manipulation, topic indication, topic related literal scene manipulation and ambiguation. The data analysed testify to the fact that in the result of component substitution the meaning of an idiom may be intensified, weakened or specified.
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