Katarzyna Horszowska, d95142005

Course: Syntax

2008.12.30

Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Connor 1988.
“Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case
of Let Alone.” In: Language, Vol. 64, No. 3, pp. 501-538.

Report of pages: 501-506

The main assumption: pragmatics pervades grammar.

Constructions:

– Like nuclear family they spread to the ‘wider ranges of the

sentential tree’
– Constructions provide syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic
information
– Lexical items may be viewed as constructions themselves
– Constructions may be idiomatic

Linguistic competence:

– The speakers of the language posses the knowledge of the

words, i.e. information about their function in phrases, in what
context they appear, what they mean and what their
pronunciation is.
– Speakers know one or more grammatical rules, according to
which they construct simple phrases
– Speakers know the basic semantic interpretation principles by
which the meanings of the phrases and sentences can be
constructed out of the meanings of their constituent words and
phrases
– Speakers are able to make connection between sentences and
particular types of situations (they have pragmatic knowledge).

What is idiomatic?

An idiomatic expression or construction is something that a speaker

could fail to know.

The purpose of this paper:

1) This what is called ‘idiomatic’ is a very large repository

2) To prove that it is necessary to describe the idiomatic
expressions from different angles, not only the syntactic one
3) Create a model of linguistic competence, in which idiomatic
expressions are included
Decoding idioms: expressions, which the language user couldn’t
interpret with complete confidence, if they hadn’t learned it
separately.

Encoding idioms: expressions, which language users may not

understand without prior experience.

Every decoding idiom is an encoding idiom, but not every encoding

idiom is the decoding one.

Both decoding and encoding idioms: kick the bucket, pull a fast one

Only encoding idioms: answer the door, wide awake, bright red

Grammatical idioms: words that fill in proper and familiar

grammatical structures: kick the bucket, spill the beans, blow one’s
nose (verbs and nouns show at the predicted places)

Extragrammatical idioms: have anomalous structure: first off, sight

unseen, all of a sudden, by and large, so far so good
Substantive idioms: all previous examples belong to this group,
idioms which are lexically specified.

Formal idioms: syntactic patterns dedicated to semantic and

pragmatic purposes. Formal idioms can serve as a host to
substantive idioms.

Example page 506:

1) The more careful you do your work, the easier it will get.
2) The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

Idioms with pragmatic point: expressions that have special

pragmatic purpose:

How do you do?, Once upon a time

Idioms without special pragmatic purpose: all of a sudden, by and

large

Formal idioms, eg. X-er the Y-er type can be more or less free of
pragmatic purpose. Unlike the sentence: Him be a doctor? – serves
the pragmatic and rhetorical purposes.