Idiom

An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense.

[1] Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions.

[7] John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term.

From the perspective of dependency grammar, idioms are represented as a catena which cannot be interrupted by non-idiomatic content.

Although syntactic modifications introduce disruptions to the idiomatic structure, this continuity is only required for idioms as lexical entries.

Expressions such as jump on the bandwagon, pull strings, and draw the line all represent their meaning independently in their verbs and objects, making them compositional.

The English idiom kick the bucket has a variety of equivalents in other languages, such as kopnąć w kalendarz ("kick the calendar") in Polish, casser sa pipe ("to break one’s pipe") in French[13] and tirare le cuoia ("pulling the leathers") in Italian.

Transparency is a matter of degree; spill the beans (to let secret information become known) and leave no stone unturned (to do everything possible in order to achieve or find something) are not entirely literally interpretable but involve only a slight metaphorical broadening.

Idioms tend to confuse those unfamiliar with them; students of a new language must learn its idiomatic expressions as vocabulary.

For example, the Arabic phrase في نفس المركب (fi nafs al-markeb) is translated as "in the same boat", and it carries the same figurative meaning as the equivalent idiom in English.

Another example would be the Japanese yojijukugo 一石二鳥 (isseki ni chō), which is translated as "one stone, two birds".

According to the German linguist Elizabeth Piirainen, the idiom "to get on one's nerves" has the same figurative meaning in 57 European languages.

She also says that the phrase "to shed crocodile tears", meaning to express insincere sorrow, is similarly widespread in European languages but is also used in Arabic, Swahili, Persian, Chinese,[17] Vietnamese,[18] Mongolian, and several others.

One theory is that cross-language idioms are a language contact phenomenon, resulting from a word-for-word translation called a calque.

One can know that it is not part of the idiom because it is variable; for example, How do we get to the bottom of this situation / the claim / the phenomenon / her statement / etc.

What this means is that theories of syntax that take the constituent to be the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis are challenged.

[20] The words constituting idioms are stored as catenae in the lexicon, and as such, they are concrete units of syntax.