Основы теории английского языка. Листунова Е.И. - 36 стр.

                           INTRODUCTION

      Idioms, or conventionalized multiword expressions, often but
not always non-literal, are hardly marginal in English, though they
have been relatively neglected in lexical studies of the language. This
neglect is especially evident in respect of the functions of idioms. One
of the aims of this book, accordingly, is to account for the ubiquity
of idioms by analysing what they do in different discourse types, both
spoken and written. Bread and butter, red herring, spill the beans,
bless you, go to hell, on the contrary, and in sum are idioms put to
different functional uses. Bread and butter ‘livelihood’ constitutes a
package of information, a specific experiential representation, working
together with the other packages of information carried by its co-text
to convey a message, for example. It was a simple bread and butter
issue, part of the text fragment cited below. Bless you signalling con-
viviality and go to hell signalling conflict, on the other hand, are
expressions indicating a speaker and addressee, usually physically
present, in an interpersonal exchange. In sum and on the contrary are
different again, performing as they do a relational role between the
parts of a discourse, the conclusion to a text in the first instance and a
denial of the preceding statement in the second.
      It is, however, useful to preface this discussion with the most
frequently mentioned features of idioms:
      1. Compositeness: idioms are commonly accepted as a type of
multiword expression (red herring, make up, smell a rat, the coast is
clear, etc.) though a few scholars (Hockett 1958; Katz and Postal.
1963) accept even single words as idioms.
      2. Institutionalization: idioms are conventionalized expressions,
conventionalization being the end result of initially ad hoc, and in
this sense novel, expressions.
      3. Semantic opacity: the meaning of an idiom is not the sum of
its constituents. In other words, an idiom is often non-literal.
      The widespread occurrence of these three features in common
word combinations has resulted in many types of multiword expres-
sions identified by some other term such as slang, proverbs, allusions,
similes, dead metaphors, social formulae, and collocations also being
identified as idioms, a practice evident in the works discussed below.




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