That’s the way the cookie bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blendsß

Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms. After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and their production latencies and blend errors were assessed. The first experiment showed greater interference between idioms with the same syntactic structure, demonstrating that idiom representations contain syntactic information. The second experiment indicated that the literal meaning of an idiom is active during production. These syntactic and literal-semantic effects on idiom errors argue against a representation of idioms as noncomponential lexicalized phrases. In the final experiment, no differences were found between decomposable and nondecomposable idioms, suggesting that the lexical representation of these two types of idioms is the same.

[1]  Cristina Cacciari,et al.  Understanding idiomatic expressions. The contribution of word meanings , 1991 .

[2]  Bernard J. Baars,et al.  The competing plans hypothesis: An heuristic viewpoint on the causes of errors in speech , 1980 .

[3]  M. T. Motley.  Slips of the Tongue , 1985 .

[4]  Mary C. Potter,et al.  The regeneration of syntax in short term memory , 1992 .

[5]  Raymond W. Gibbs,et al.  How to kick the bucket and not decompose: Analyzability and idiom processing , 1989 .

[6]  RAYMOND W. GIBBS,et al.  Literal Meaning and Psychological Theory , 1984, Cogn. Sci..

[7]  V. Fromkin.  Speech errors as linguistic evidence , 1976 .

[8]  Raymond W. Gibbs.  Skating on thin ice: Literal meaning and understanding idioms in conversation∗ , 1986 .

[9]  Adam Makkai,et al.  A Dictionary of American Idioms , 1995 .

[10]  David Caplan.  Speaking. From Intention to Articulation by Willem J. M. Levelt, MIT Press, 1989. £35.95 (xiv + 566 pages) ISBN 0 262 12137 9 , 1990, Trends in Neurosciences.

[11]  Cristina Cacciari,et al.  Semantic productivity and idiom comprehension. , 1994 .

[12]  Victoria A. Fromkin,et al.  The Non-Anomalous Nature of Anomalous Utterances , 1971 .

[13]  R. Gibbs,et al.  Linguistic factors in children's understanding of idioms , 1987, Journal of Child Language.

[14]  R. Gibbs,et al.  Psycholinguistic studies on the syntactic behavior of idioms , 1989, Cognitive Psychology.

[15]  Joseph Paul Stemberger,et al.  Syntactic errors in speech , 1982 .

[16]  B. Baars,et al.  Experimental verbal slip studies: A review and an editing model of language encoding , 1983 .

[17]  Samuel A. Bobrow,et al.  On catching on to idiomatic expressions , 1973, Memory & cognition.

[18]  A. Roelofs,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking , 1992, Cognition.

[19]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The access and processing of idiomatic expressions , 1979 .

[20]  Gary S. Dell,et al.  Stages in sentence production: An analysis of speech error data , 1981 .

[21]  R. GibbsJr..  Literal meaning and psychological theory , 1984 .

[22]  R. Gibbs,et al.  Syntactic frozenness in processing and remembering idioms , 1985, Cognition.

[23]  M. Garrett.  Levels of processing in sentence production , 1980 .

[24]  D. G. MacKay.  The structure of words and syllables: Evidence from errors in speech , 1972 .

[25]  D. Fay,et al.  Substitutions and splices: a study of sentence blends , 1981 .

[26]  W. Levelt,et al.  Monitoring and self-repair in speech , 1983, Cognition.

[27]  R. Gibbs,et al.  Speakers' assumptions about the lexical flexibility of idioms , 1989, Memory & cognition.

[28]  G S Dell,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. , 1986, Psychological review.

[29]  Trevor A. Harley,et al.  A Critique of Top-down Independent Levels Models of Speech Production: Evidence from Non-plan-Internal Speech Errors , 1984, Cogn. Sci..

[30]  William Labov,et al.  6. Problems in the Analysis of Idioms , 1980 .

[31]  G. Nunberg.  The pragmatics of reference , 1978 .

[32]  Gary S. Dell,et al.  A Synthesis of Some Recent Work in Sentence Production , 1989 .

[33]  B. Butterworth,et al.  Speech errors: old data in search of new theories , 1981 .

[34]  P. Tabossi,et al.  The comprehension of idioms. , 1988 .

[35]  Mary McGee Wood.  A definition of idiom , 1986 .

[36]  B. Baars,et al.  Formulation hypotheses revisited: A reply to Stemberger , 1983, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

[37]  K. Bock,et al.  Structure in language. Creating form in talk. , 1990, The American psychologist.