Semantic productivity and idiom comprehension

Abstract

When people understand an idiom such as “spill the beans,” two kinds of meaning are simultaneously apprehended: the meanings of the words themselves and the idiomatic meaning. Standard models of language comprehension assume that the literal meanings of figurative expressions are rejected in favor of a nonliteral meaning. We propose an alternative approach in which literal meanings are systematically used to constrain the use and variation of conventional idioms and to generate novel idiom variants.