Adel Antoinette SZABÓ
Universitatea « Babeş-Bolyai » din Cluj-Napoca
People should have strong conventional images for many idioms. Those images are constructed on the basis of the conceptual metaphors motivating the figurative meaning of idioms. Thus, idioms are not “dead” metaphors with their meanings being arbitrarily determined, in many cases their meanings being motivated by the speaker’s tacit knowledge of the conceptual metaphors underlying the meanings of these figurative phrases.
Both in the English lexicology, and the Romanian one, idioms have been considered, for many years, as “non-decomposable” expressions, that is, the meaning of the whole phrase could not be deduced from the meaning of its components. Later studies proved that, on the contrary, idioms are decomposable. The meaning of an idiom is not arbitrary, as the meaning of a word is, and its meaning can be derived from the meaning of its components. This feature, namely, the analyzability of idioms, is responsible for the lexical and syntactic flexibility, as well as for the semantic productivity of idioms.
The figurative meanings of idioms may very well be motivated by people’s conceptual knowledge that has a metaphoric basis. There are significant differences in the processing of literal and idiomatic expressions, due to the metaphoric nature of idioms. Although, in many instances idioms are considered dead metaphors, people make sense of them because they “tacitly recognize the metaphorical mapping of information from two domains that gives rise to idioms in the first place” (Gibbs, 1994).
When idioms are processed, people’s assumptions about how the individual components of idioms refer to the metaphorical concepts underlying their figurative referents result in different information than when literal language is used. This is applicable particularly to idioms that have a higher degree of analyzability, because it is easier for people to map their individual components onto different kinds of metaphorical concepts for these particular expressions. For example, the idiom John spilled the beans maps the speaker’s knowledge of someone’s tipping over a container of beans – the source domain – onto a person revealing a secret – the target domain. For English speakers spill the beans means ‘reveal a secret’ because there are underlying conceptual metaphors, such as THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES, that structure their conceptions of minds, secrets, and disclosure (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
The very existence of these conceptual metaphors does not necessarily predict that certain idioms must appear in the language. The presence of these conceptual metaphors by which we make sense of experience provides a partial motivation for why specific phrases, such as spill the beans are used to refer to particular events – the revealing of secrets (Gibbs, 1994).
Research has proved that idioms do not exist as separate semantic units within the lexicon but actually reflect coherent systems of metaphorical concepts. For example, the conceptual metaphor, ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER motivates idioms such as: blow your stack, flip your lid, hit the ceiling, get hot under the collar, lose your cool, and get steamed up. This set of idioms is one small set of conceptual mappings between different source and target domains that form part of our conceptualization of anger.
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The hypothesis that idioms make sense in the ways they do precisely because they are motivated by conceptual knowledge that is metaphorical, has been explored by various studies.
Why do some idioms like blow your stack, flip your lid or hit the ceiling refer to the idea of getting very angry in a way that phrases like run to the store or mow your lawn do not? The dead-metaphor view does not explain why some idioms seem so rightly to have the meanings they do.
Psycholinguistic studies have investigated the metaphorical motivation for idiomatic meaning empirically. One way to discover the speakers’ tacit knowledge of the metaphorical basis for idioms is through a detailed examination of speakers’ mental images of idioms (Gibbs
&O’Brien, 1990).
Take the idiom spill the beans, for example. Any speaker is able to form a mental image of this phrase, describe the image to himself and then ask himself several questions regarding:
the place the beans were before they were spilled;
the size of the container, whether the beans are cooked or uncooked;
if the spilling was intentional or accidental;
where are the beans once they were spilled;
if the beans are in nice neat pile, where should the beans be;
whether they are easy to retrieve after spilling (Gibbs, 1994).
Most people have definite answers to these questions about their mental images of idioms.
Subjects of experiments that tried to prove this fact answered that the beans were in a pot that is about the size of a person’s head, the beans are uncooked, the spilling is accidental, the spilled beans are on the floor and they are difficult to retrieve.
If one assumes that idioms are arbitrary, this consistency in people’s intuitions about their mental images cannot be explained. The only reasonable explanation could be that people’s mental images of idioms reveal some of the metaphorical knowledge that motivates their meaning. The consistency in people’s responses about the causes and consequences of actions in their mental images of idioms comes from people’s tacit knowledge of idioms being structured by conceptual metaphors.
The general schemas underlying people’s mental images of idioms were not simply representative of the idioms’ figurative meaning, “but captured more specific aspects of the kinesthetic events with the images” (Gibbs, 1994). For example, for the anger idioms, such as flip your lid, hit the ceiling , the participants to experiments in this direction, specifically imagined for these phrases “some force causing a container to release pressure in a violent manner” (Gibbs,
1994). Nothing in the surface form of these idioms would impose any constraint on the mental images people have. But the participants’ protocols in this study showed little variation in their images of idioms with similar interpretations.
Also, the participants’ responses to the questions about the causes and consequences of the actions described in their images were highly consistent. When imagining anger idioms, such as flip your lid, hit the ceiling, people reported that:
pressure, translated into stress or frustration, caused the action;
one had little control over the pressure once it was building;
its violent release was done unintentionally, as in blow your stack;
once the release had taken place - the lid flipped, the ceiling hit, the stack blown – it was difficult, if not impossible to reverse the action.
The only logical explanation for people’s consistency in their intuitions about the causes, manner, and consequences of the actions described in their mental images of idioms is that the conceptual metaphors that underlie idioms impose certain limits for the kinds of images people create for idioms.
For example, for anger people use their knowledge about physical events, namely, the behavior of heated fluid or vapor building up and escaping from containers. These containers have
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been reported to be most often the size of a person’s head. This way, people’s metaphorical mapping of knowledge from a source domain – the heated fluid in a container – onto a target domain – the anger emotion – “helps them conceptualize in concrete terms what is understood about the target domain of anger” (Gibbs, 1994).
“The metaphorical ways in which we partially conceptualize experiences like anger actually provide part of the motivation for why people have consistent mental images, and specific knowledge about these images, for idioms with similar figurative meanings” (Gibbs, 1994).
One counterargument to this demonstration might be that any consistency in people’s mental images for idioms with similar figurative meanings may be due not to the constraints imposed by the conceptual metaphors but to the very fact that these expressions have similar meanings.
However, the literal interpretation of anger idioms, namely ‘get very angry’, by itself does not give too many information about the causes and consequences of the actions described in people’s mental images, therefore this alternative hypothesis does not carry much weight.
Another set of follow-up studies showed that knowing the figurative meaning of an idiom
(e.g. ‘getting angry’) does not by itself explain why people have such systematic knowledge of their images of idioms. A wide variety of mental images was produced by subjects when asked to imagine ‘to get very angry’, but with no consistency regarding the causation, intentionality, manner and consequences about the actions in their mental images of paraphrases of the idioms.
This system of mental images of idioms supports the idea that the figurative meanings of idioms are motivated by various metaphorical concepts that exist independently as part of our conceptual system. Experiments could not prove that people actually form mental images of idioms as a normal part of the process of understanding of idioms. The data demonstrate only how people’s common metaphorical knowledge provides part of the motivation for why idioms have the figurative meanings they do (Gibbs, 1994).
Analyzing some Romanian and English equivalent idioms it is impossible not to notice that equivalent idioms in the two languages are, very often, motivated by the same metaphorical concept: blow your stack = a-şi ieşi din fire ; flip your lid/blow one’s top = a-i sări capacele/ a-i sări supapa de siguranţă; hit the ceiling = a sări în sus până în tavan; get hot under the collar = a-i sări ţandăra/muştarul; lose your cool = a-şi pierde sărita
are all motivated by the concept ANGER IS
HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER. Idioms such as jump at his throat = a sări la beregată or bite hid head off
= a sări la cap are motivated by the concept ANGRY BEHAVIOR IS ANIMAL
BEHAVIOR. The two languages are not genetically related, and the hypothesis of borrowings can also be excluded. What could be the explanation for such a puzzling fact?
It has been demonstrated by now that the meaning of idioms is not arbitrary. Their meaning is motivated by the metaphorical mapping and certain mental images (Lakoff & Johnson, 2000). All these schemas refer to physical experiences, with the possibility of mapping these experiences onto other domains, such as communication or social relations.
Cognitive linguistics assumes that the metaphorical concepts, that motivate idioms as well, are concepts of out bodies in their interaction with the world, and not abstract concepts (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980). The domains the imagistic schemas map onto belong to the background of the general knowledge about the world, which is a representation that tacitly appears during speech acts. This general knowledge about the world of physical events should be common to many languages, especially to European languages, this being one of the main conditions of communication.
Another explanation of this fact might be the one given by Eugenio Coseriu (2000-2001):
“The linguistic knowledge is, most of the times, a metaphorical knowledge, a knowledge through images, and which, most often is oriented in the same direction, a fact that makes us think of a certain universal unity, beyond idiomatic, ethnic or cultural differences.”
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