Cognitive Linguistic and Idioms

General considerations about cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics is a new approach to the study of language which emerged in the

late seventies and early eighties and interprets linguistic knowledge as part of general

cognition and thinking. This new contemporary study that argues that language is governed

by general cognitive principles, rather than by a special –purpose language module, is

therefore associated with semantics, but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon

empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that

underlie the acquisition and storage of speech.

The most influential linguists working along these lines and focusing on cognitive

principles were Charles Fillmore, Wallace Chafe, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts, Roland

Langacker and Leonard Talmy. The most important assumption shared by all these

researchers is that meaning is so central to language that it must be a primary focus of study.

Linguistic structures serve the function of expressing meanings and thus, the mapping

between meaning and form are a prime subject of linguistic analysis.

In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geerates stated : “ Cognitive

Linguistics is the study of language in its cognitive function, where cognitive refers to the

crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world.

Cognitive Linguistics is cognitive in the same way that cognitive psychology is: by assuming

that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind.

It is more specific than cognitive psychology, however, by focusing on natural language as a

means for organizing, processing, and conveying that information. Language, then, is seen as

a repository of world knowledge, a structured collection of meaningful categories that help

us deal with new experiences and store information about the old one.

Aspect of language and expression that had been consigned to the periphery of language,

such as metaphor and metonymy, are redeemed and rehabilitated within Cognitive

Linguistics. They are understood to be powerful conceptual mappings at the very core of

human thought and in everyday speaking and thinking.

Cognitive linguistics deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that

is unique and autonomus. Important researchers in linguistics (Rosch 1973, Mervis and

Rosch 1975) argued that features of language and our ability to learn and use them are

accounted for by general cognitive abilities, our visual and sensimotor skills and our human

categorization strategies, together with our cultural and functional parameters. The storage

and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of

other knowledge, and that use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive

abilities to those used in other non-linguistic tasks.

The most important keyword in Cognitive Linguistics is embodiment (Jhonson 1987,

Lakoff 1987, Lakoff and Jhonson 1999). Cognitive linguistics seek to understand how

memory, categorization and imagery affect language. It is believed that mental and linguistic

categories are not abstract disembodied and human independent categories; we create them

on the basis of our concrete experiences and under the constraints imposed by our bodies.

Human conceptual categories, the meaning of words and sentences and the meaning of

linguistic structures at any level are not a set of universal abstract features or uninterpreted

symbols. They are motivated and grounded directly in experience, in our physical, social and

cultural experiences.

Cognitive linguists study and theorize about the functional principles of linguistic

organization. The cognitive abilities that organize language are not exclusive to language.

These capacities include viewpoint, perspective, conceptual integration and analogy.

Cognitive linguists focus on conceptual categories like: motion and location, force and

causation ,entities and processes. Grammar is based on conceptual abilities, including the

ability to look at a situation in abstract ways, understand the connections between different

concepts and organize ideas on multiple levels.

The idea that language and language production is a cognitive ability is a basic idea

around which the field of cognitive linguistics is centered. Because important cognitive

researchers see language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities of man, topics of

special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the structural characteristics of natural

language categorization (such as systematic polysemy, prototypicality, cognitive models,

mental imagery and metaphor ); the functional principles of linguistic organization; the

conceptual interface between syntax and semantics (as explored by cognitive grammar); the

experimental and pragmatic background of language-in-use and the relationship between

language and thought. For many cognitive linguists, the main interest in Cognitive

Linguistics lies in its provision of a better-grounded approach to and set of theoretical

assumptions for syntactic and semantic theory than generative linguistics provides.

For others, however, an important starting point in cognitive research is represented by the

opportunity to link the study of language and the mind to the study of the brain.

The cognitive approach of idioms

Idioms are characteristic of almost any language in the world and are frequently used

in daily speech by natives. Traditionally, idioms are believed to be non-compositional. This

means that the meaning of each constituent word from an idiom is unable to capture the

overall meaning of that idiomatic expressio

According to the cognitive view, many idioms are products of our conceptual system

not simply a matter of language. There is a tendency among current approaches of idiomatic

expressions to underline the idea that the relation between the idiomatic meaning and the

linguistic form of most idioms is often not completely arbitrary. Nunberg claims that

idiomaticity is a semantic rather than a syntactic phenomenon. He proposed a typology of

idioms regarding their degree of compositionality.

Opaque idioms are those idiomatic expressions in which the constituent parts of the

expression do not contribute to the idiomatic meaning, like in the well-known

expression :kick the bucket. If the individual constituents in the string contribute to the

figurative interpretation, the idiom is considered to be decomposable, exactly like in the

expression “ spill the beans” (where ‘spill’ refers to the ‘act of revealing’ and ‘the bean’

emphasize the idea of a ‘secret’).

Gibbs and O’Brien (1990:37) try to infirm the traditional approaches according to which

idioms are non-compositional expressions from semantic point of view. They claim that

language use is constrained and motivated by pre-existing metaphorical schemas in people’s

mind, which are grounded in their bodily experience. Native speakers prove a remarkable

consistency concerning the mental images which underlie the idioms, sometimes different in

form, but with similar figurative meaning.

Regarding to the cognitive perspective of idioms, idiomatic expressions cannot

merely be described as lexical items. They seem to occupy a position between the productive

and reproductive aspects of linguistic competence. Idiom variation is claimed to underline

intelligent creative behaviour that exploits basic knowledge-resources and the information

processing capacities of the human mind.

Phraseological researches have demonstrated that idioms show a greater degree of

formal and semantic flexibility than was traditionally conceded. However we will speculate

and discuss this aspect, the debate about the precise linguistic and mental quality of idioms is

still undecided.

Idioms are generally considered not to follow the principle of compositionality which

suggest that “ […] the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its

constituent parts and the way these are syntactically combined”(van der Linden, 1993:2).

Gibbs (1994:273) argues that the reason why idioms are often considered to be “ dead

metaphors” is given by the confusion that linguists usually makes between dead metaphors

and conventional ones. Because people generally have little knowledge of the original

metaphorical roots of an idiom (for example “ “to be soft hearted” ) , it is believed that the

comprehension of idioms is the same as knowing the meaning of individual words, which is

based on convention.

Almost in the same way that literal and other figurative aspects of language ( e.g. metonymy

or metaphor) are comprehended, the compositional approach to idioms representation is

based on the idea that idiomatic meanings are simultaneously composed and processing out

of literal word meanings and the specific interpretation of these word meanings within a

particular context.

Kovecses and Szabo (1996:338) consider that metonymy involves a stand for

conceptual relationship between two entities within a single domain, while metaphor is

understood as a relationship between two conceptual domains such as anger and fire. They

suggested that the meaning of many idioms depends on the following factors:

source-target relationship which determines the general meaning idioms;

systematic mappings between the source and target domains which provide more

specific meaning of idioms;

particular knowledge structures of inferences associated with the source domain, i.e

the general knowledge of the world;

cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy;

Language is perceived as a continuum from simple to more complex units and not as

grammar dichotomy. In cognitive semantics, it has been considered that many figurative

expressions such as idioms are motivated rather than arbitrary. In others words, while their

figurative meaning cannot be completely predictable from literal meanings of their parts, the

connection between their figurative and literal meanings may be possible.

Traditional methods of teaching and learning idioms focus on memorization. Such

rigid process can be time and effort –consuming as learners picked up discretely without

associations between forms and meanings. To bridge the methodological gaps, an alternative

method which integrates metaphoric mappings in the learning process had been proposed

among the time. Many linguists believe that the metaphoric mappings build correspondences

between source and target concepts of idioms and thus facilitate english foreign learners to

understand the motivations.

According to Kövecses (2002), when an idiomatic expression is motivated by

metaphor, the more general meaning of the string is based on the target domain that is

applicable to the idiom in question. Regarding the comprehension of idioms, two basic

theoretical approaches have been proposed: one interpretation refers to the lexical

representation hypothesis , which suggests that they are mentally represented and processed

as lexical items, the idiomatic phrase being just a large word-like unit. An alternative

interpretation is expressed by the configurational hypothesis which claims that idioms may be

mentally represented or processed not as words, but as configurations of words whose

meaning become activated whenever “ sufficient input has rendered the configurations

recognizable” (Papagno & Vallar, 2000, p.516). Gibbs and O’Brian (1990, p. 147) assumed

that the consistency of the idiom images is due to the “ constraining influence of conceptual

metaphors” according to which the underlying nature of our thought process is metaphorical.

In other words, people use metaphor to make sense of our experience. Consequently

when the speakers of a language come across a verbal metaphor the corresponding

conceptual metaphor will be automatically activated.

Opaque idioms should be considered as special cases of idiomatic expressions which

assimilate to individual words in the sense that their syntactic properties and meanings are

exclusively related to the form that comprise them. However, this view should be restricted to

a limited number of idioms. Another group of idioms is made up of idioms whose parts

convey information that can be interpreted in one way or another with the aid of cognitive

operations, but may still be learned as a whole. A representative example for this situation

can be “spill the beans” . This expression is too much conventionalized, and its meaning

cannot be recovered from the literal interpretation of its constituents. Somehow , contrary to

the expectations, metaphorical correspondences can be established between “spill “ and

“reveal” , and between “ beans” and “ secrets” and in one way or another the individual

components of the expression aid in the overall interpretation , but the structure of the

expression can be altered in some contexts and for several purpose. For example, someone

who is aware of the fact that s/he should have not revealed certain information and who

intends to apologize in an informal way may say : “Ooops , I may have spilled some of the

beans!”. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether speakers of a language have access to this

interpretation on the basis of a direct form-meaning connection or by taking into account the

individual parts of the idiom.

According to the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis (Gibbs, 1990), idiomatic

expressions are represented in the mental lexicon in different ways depending on the

semantic analysability of its individual components. If we assume that idioms have only one

semantic representation, there is no way of explaining the syntactic flexibility of some groups

of idioms. The model mentioned above claims that speakers analyse idioms from a

compositional perspective because they acknowledge the metaphoric mapping from a source

to a target domain.

Idioms based on Metaphor

In contradiction with non-compositional idioms, decomposable idioms are able to

undergo certain syntactic operations that lead us to the conclusion that “ pieces of an idiom

typically have identifiable meanings which combine to produce the meaning of the whole:.

(Wasow,1982).-parising decomposable idioms.

Reccent researches in the field of cognitive linguistics have shown that the meaning of an

idiom is not arbitrary, as the meaning of a word is, and its overall meaning can be derived

from the meaning of its components. People should have strong conventional images for

many idiomatic

strings. Their figurative meanings can be very well motivated by people’s conceptual

knowledge that has a metaphoric basis. There are many differences in the processing of literal

and idiomatic expressions, because of the metaphoric nature of idioms.

During the processing and comprehension of idioms, people’s assumptions about the

way in which the individual components of this idiomatic strings refers to the metaphorical

concepts underlying their figurative referents, differ greatly from the perceptions obtained

when literal language is used. For example, the idiomatic expression Ann spilled the beans,

maps the speaker’s knowledge of someone’s tipping over a container of beans- the source

domain- into a person revealing a secret- the target domain. For native 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) .

Linguists have proved that idiomatic strings do not exist as separate semantic units

within the lexicon, they are actually conventional expressions which reflect coherent systems

of metaphorical concepts. Metaphor and metonymy, are considered to be in the last twenty

years, as mechanisms that relate a domain(or domanins) of knowledge to an idiomatic

meaning in an indirect way. Conceptual metaphors bring two domains of knowledge into a

direct relationship of correspondence. One is a familiar physical domain and the other is less

familiar, an abstract domain. Emotion concepts and concepts denoting personal relationship

are normally susceptible to metaphorical understanding.

There are more than one hundred emotion idioms in English, used to express anger.

For example, in the expression “spit fire” , the domain of fire is used to understand the

domain of anger , or, in other words, anger is comprehended throw the concept of fire. Thus,

we can call the ANGER IS FIRE conceptual metaphor (where the capital letters indicate

concepts rather than words). In the case of the sentence “The fire between them finally went

out”, the conceptual metaphor underlying the idiom LOVE IS FIRE, or in “The painting set

fire to the composer’s imagination” , the IMAGINATION IS FIRE.

Now we are in the position to provide a specific illustration for the idiomatic

expression “ to spit fire” used above, illustration which emphasize the conceptual motivation for

this idiom.

Special idiomatic meaning ‘ be very angry’

Cognitive mechanism Metaphor : “anger is fire”