Event Date: Wednesday, 4 May, 2016
Location: Via Santa Maria, 36, Pisa, PI, Italia [2nd floor seminar room]
Speaker: Kristina Geeraert (University of Alberta)
Title: The fat lady hasn’t sung yet: A multi-methodological investigation of idiomatic variation
Abstract: Idioms have traditionally been regarded as ‘frozen expressions’, or expressions that are fixed in form, and therefore research has largely focused on this canonical form (cf. Swinney & Cutler 1979; Cacciari & Tabossi 1988; Sprenger 2003). Recent corpus-based research has shown that idioms can occur with a range of variation, such as shake in one’s shoes/boots and make rapid headway (cf. Moon 1998; Barlow 2000; Duffley 2013; Schröder 2013), but few experimental studies have investigated this variation (cf. Gibbs & Nayak 1989; Gibbs et al. 1989; McGlone et al. 1994). This study attempts to fill that gap by exploring idiomatic variation using multiple methods. In one experiment, speakers were asked to rate the acceptability of several types of variants to determine if speakers have a preference for certain variants. An eye-tracking study was also conducted using these same variants to determine if certain variants are easier to understand. Finally, speakers were asked to produce idioms in an elicitation task specifically designed to encourage creativity. The results from these experiments reveal that some variants, such as integrated concepts (e.g. pull the political strings), are rated with greater acceptability and produced more often, but show longer reading times due to the additional information, while other variants, like lexical variation (e.g. tug the strings), are less preferred and produced less often, but do not show significantly different reading times than the canonical form. Idioms have a much greater potential for variation than is often assumed – they can be utilized with a considerable range of variation while still interpretable with their idiomatic meaning. This study thus leads to a view of idioms as being not so much different from non-idiomatic or ‘literal’ language.