Creativity in Idiom Use: The Case of RING Idioms in COCA  

Oleh:

SETIAWAN, AFANDI ; DEVINA, AZARIA

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: CONCORPS: The 3rd Atma Jaya Conference on Corpus Studies, Gaining Better Insights Into Language Through Corpora, Jakarta, August 21, 2015, page 37-52.
Topik: idiom; variation; creativity
Fulltext: hal 37.pdf (11.76MB)

Isi artikel

Idioms are prototypically characterized as exhibiting a number of principal properties: institutionalization, compositeness, non-compositionality, and fixedness. With respect to these properties, it might generally be assumed that idioms should be frozen (or fossilized) and severely restricted in their occurrences. In brief, they might be thought to disallow any modification or alteration. However, as noted by a number of scholars, for instance Moon (1998), Schmitt (2000), Langlotz (2006), and Taylor (2012), this is not the case. Idioms are best deemed to have a relatively great degree of fixedness rather than an absolute fixedness. Put differently, idioms vary in the degree to which they are fixed. This view is in harmony with the principle embraced by scholars working within the framework of modern linguistics that language use is a creative undertaking. This present paper demonstrates the kinds of creativity in the use of supposedly ‘fixed’ idioms that appear in the online Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) by showing variations involved in four idioms featuring the word RING, namely: (1.) RING A BELL, (2.) ALARM BELL / BELLS (START) RINGING, (3.) RING FAMILIAR / TRUE / HOLLOW / FALSE, and (4.) [HAVE] A FAMILIAR RING / [HAVE] A RING OF TRUTH. Throughout the paper, it will be shown that these idioms do vary with respect to their syntactic and some other aspects. Though the syntactic structures of these idioms vary, the semantic features do not change.

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