volume: 5 (2002)
pages: 17–30
author: Réka Benczes
title: The semantics of idioms: a cognitive linguistic approach
abstract: Right until the late seventies the main trend in idiom analysis was to view these expressions as non-compositional items, whose meaning is arbitrary and does not have anything to do with the meaning of the constituents. However, research in the past twenty years has shown that a large group of idioms does seem to be partially compositional in nature, that is the meaning of the constituents is connected to the overall meaning of the expression. This view has been adopted by cognitive linguistics as well, which maintains that the “connection” between the constituents’ literal meaning and the overall figurative meaning arises from “motivation” stemming from the unconscious conceptual structures in the language user’s head.
The first part of the paper discusses theoretical issues: after outlining the main tenets of the traditional approach it examines the basis for the conceptual view of idioms. Following in the footsteps of cognitive linguistic theory, the second part of the paper analyses a special set of English idioms, namely those which have the body part head within them. The aim is to investigate what conceptual metaphors or metonymies underlie these idioms and what these conceptual vehicles might say about our everyday conceptualisations of the head.
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