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Idioms
An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages. In English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are "spill the beans" (meaning "reveal secret information"), "it's raining cats and dogs" (meaning "it's raining intensely"), and "break a leg" (meaning "good luck"). Derivations Many idiomatic expressions were meant literally in their original use, but occasionally the attribution of the literal meaning changed and the phrase itself grew away from its original roots—typically leading to a folk etymology. For instance, the phrase "spill the beans" (meaning to reveal a secret) is first attested in 1919, but has been said to originate from an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Catena (linguistics)
In linguistics, a catena (English pronunciation: , plural catenas or catenae; from Latin for "chain") is a unit of syntax and morphology (linguistics), morphology, closely associated with dependency grammars. It is a more flexible and inclusive unit than the constituent (linguistics), constituent and its proponents therefore consider it to be better suited than the constituent to serve as the fundamental unit of syntactic and morphosyntactic analysis. The catena has served as the basis for the analysis of a number of phenomena of syntax, such as idiom, idiosyncratic meaning, Ellipsis (linguistics), ellipsis mechanisms (e.g. gapping, stripping (linguistics), stripping, Verb phrase ellipsis, VP-ellipsis, pseudogapping, sluicing, answer ellipsis, comparative deletion), predicate (grammar), predicate-verb argument, argument structures, and Discontinuity (linguistics), discontinuities (topicalization, wh-fronting, Scrambling (linguistics), scrambling, extraposition, etc.). The catena co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phraseology
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as ''phrasemes''), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words ''Dutch'' ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and ''auction'' ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods are sold to the highest bidder’; instead, the phrase has a conventionalized meaning referring to any auction where, instead of rising, the prices fall. History Phraseology (from Ancient Greek, Greek φράσις ''phrasis'', "way of speaking" and -λογία ''-logia'', "study of") is a scholarly approach to language which developed in the twentieth century. It too ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literal And Figurative Language
The distinction between literal and figurative language exists in all natural languages; the phenomenon is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics. *Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation. *Figurative (or non-literal) language is the usage of words in addition to, or deviating beyond, their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complex meaning or achieve a heightened effect. This is done by language-users presenting words in such a way that their audience equates, compares, or associates the words with normally unrelated meanings. A common intended effect of figurative language is to elicit audience responses that are especially emotional (like excitement, shock, laughter, etc.), aesthetic, or intellectual. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and later the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Break A Leg
"Break a leg" is an English-language idiom used in the context of theatre or other performing arts to wish a performer "luck, good luck". An ironic or non-literal saying of uncertain origin (a dead metaphor), "break a leg" is commonly said to actors and musicians before they go on stage to perform or before an audition. Though a similar and potentially related term exists in German without theatrical associations, the English expression with the luck-based meaning is first attributed in the theatre in the 1930s or possibly 1920s. Origins Superstition theories There is anecdotal evidence of this expression from theatrical memoirs and personal letters as early as the 1920s. The urbane Irish nationalist Robert Wilson Lynd published an article, "A Defence of Superstition", in the October 1921 edition of the ''New Statesman'', a British liberal political and cultural magazine, that provides one of the earliest mentions of this usage in English: Thus, Lynd describes the expression as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irreversible Binomial
In linguistics and stylistics, an irreversible binomial, frozen binomial, binomial freeze, binomial expression, binomial pair, or nonreversible word pair is a pair of words used together in fixed order as an idiomatic expression or collocation. The words have a semantic relationship usually involving the words ''and'' or ''or''. They also belong to the same part of speech: nouns (''milk and honey''), adjectives (''short and sweet''), or verbs (''do or die''). The order of word elements cannot be reversed. The term "irreversible binomial" was introduced by Yakov Malkiel in 1954, though various aspects of the phenomenon had been discussed since at least 1903 under different names: a "terminological imbroglio". Ernest Gowers used the name Siamese twins (i.e., conjoined twins) in the 1965 edition of Fowler's ''Modern English Usage''. The 2015 edition reverts to the scholarly name, "irreversible binomials", as "Siamese twins" had become politically incorrect. Many irreversible bin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated. There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase ( phrasal verbs), and verb + adverb. Collocation extraction is a computational technique that finds collocations in a document or corpus, using various computational linguistics elements resembling data mining. Expanded definition Collocations are partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yojijukugo
A is a Japanese lexeme consisting of four ''kanji'' (Chinese characters). English translations of include "four-character compound", "four-character idiom", "four-character idiomatic phrase", and "four-character idiomatic compound". It is equivalent to the Chinese . Definition and classification in the broad sense refers to Japanese compound words consisting of four ''kanji'' characters, which may contain an idiomatic meaning or simply be a compound noun. However, in the narrow or strict sense, the term refers only to four-''kanji'' compounds that have a particular (idiomatic) meaning, which cannot be inferred from the meanings of the components that make them up. Non-idiomatic There are a very large number—perhaps tens of thousands—of four-character compounds. A great majority of them are those whose meanings can be easily deduced from the literal definitions of their parts. These compounds may be called ''non-idiomatic'' . For example, the compound word is a non- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phrase
In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence. In theoretical linguistics, phrases are often analyzed as units of syntactic structure such as a Constituent (linguistics), constituent. There is a difference between the common use of the term ''phrase'' and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, a phrase is usually a group of words with some special idiomatic meaning or other significance, such as "all rights reserved", "economical with the truth", "kick the bucket", and the like. It may be a euphemism, a saying or proverb, a fixed expression, a figure of speech, etc.. In linguistics, these are known as phrasemes. In theories of syntax, a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Literal Translation
Literal translation, direct translation, or word-for-word translation is the translation of a text done by translating each word separately without analysing how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory, another term for literal translation is ''metaphrase'' (as opposed to ''paraphrase'' for an analogous translation). It is to be distinguished from an Language interpretation, interpretation (done, for example, by an interpreter). Literal translation leads to mistranslation of idioms, which can be a serious problem for machine translation. Translation studies Usage The term "literal translation" often appeared in the titles of 19th-century English translations of the classical Bible and other texts. Cribs Word-for-word translations ("cribs", "ponies", or "trots") are sometimes prepared for writers who are translating a work written in a language they do not know. For example, Robert Pinsky is reported to have used a literal translation in prep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verb
A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle ''to'', is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; and future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb ''will'' or ''shall''. For example: * Lucy ''will go'' to school. ''(action, future)'' * Barack Obama ''became'' the President of the United States in 2009. ''(occurrence, past)'' * Mike Trout ''is'' a center fielder. ''(state of bein ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polysemes
Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, morpheme, word, or phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from '' monosemy'', where a word has a single meaning. Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as ''bear'' the animal, and the verb ''bear''); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy is not. In discerning whether a given set of meanings represent polysemy or homonymy, it is often necessary to look at the history of the word to see whether the two meanings are historically related. Dictionary writers often list polysemes (words or phrases with different, but related, senses) in the same entry (that is, under the same headword) and enter homonyms as separate headwords (usually with a numbering convention such as ''¹bear'' and ''²bear''). Polysemes A polyseme is a word or phrase with dif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
