Additional Meanings of Human Body-related Idioms: Context, Semantics

Abstract

The paper addresses a vital issue of forming idioms with nominations of human body. Human body-related words nominating body parts, physiological and mental processes are used to form numerous English idioms. In given paper these idioms are referred to as human body-related. The paper aims at revealing the specifics of lexical and semantic constituents of the idioms with reference to their contexts. We collected 200 human body-related English idioms from academic books and dictionaries. The research comprised four stages. The thematic classification based on the lexical structure of the idioms revealed prevalence of the idioms comprising words head, eyes, heart, back, foot, and hand. The similarities found in the meanings of all the idioms under study provided semantic classification into five groups, namely, characteristics, action, state, causation, and ability. Next we focused on contextual and semantic specifics of the idioms. In particular, the idioms, containing the word head were studied in the texts of the British National Corpus. The contexts provided the following additional meanings of the idioms: higher position, achievements, location, expenses, and inability to do something. The revealed collocations follow AV+K type. The obtained results and developed algorithm may be applied to lexical and contextual studies of idioms and lexical groups.