University Calendar
Brown Bag on Language and Information with Christiane Fellbaum
Wednesday, April 26, 1PM
Schmitt Hall 104
Light refreshments will be provided
No need to RSVP
Is there a “grammar of idioms”?
Dr. Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_Fellbaum
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~fellbaum/
The canonical view of idioms like bite the bullet and miss the boat is that they are “long words,” more or less fixed phrases with a non-compositional meaning. However, corpus data show that such idioms are lexically and syntactically flexible. Moreover, deviations from an idiom’s dictionary form are not necessarily tied to the semantic transparency or metaphoric status of its constituents. Rich variations, often context-specific, include grammatical operations like passivization, relativization and topicalization. My talk will focus on lexical variations in VP idioms, such as substitution of semantically and/or phonologically related words, both intra- and crosslingually, in spoken and sign language. The data suggest that production and reception of idioms require access to all levels of grammar. I propose constraints on the lexical variability of idioms that are consistent with models of the mental lexicon as well as with psycholinguistic theories of idiom processing and that can account for the fact that speakers recover the meaning of idioms even when they deviate from the “canonical” form.