Swimming against the current: Do idioms reflect conceptual structure?

Abstract

Recent work inspired by cognitive linguistics suggests that some idioms make sense (i.e., their meanings seem transparent) because they are motivated by conceptual structures that exist independently of language. We claim that idioms cannot, in principle, be used to argue for the existence of such conceptual structures. To support this argument we demonstrate that people's intuitions about idiom transparency vary as a function of what they believe to be the meaning of the idiom. Thus, when people learn an idiom's meaning, they attempt to map elements of that meaning onto the linguistic constituents of the idiom. This mapping makes the stipulated meaning seem transparent, while it obscures the possibility that the idiom conceivably could mean something else. For example, people who learn that the statement ‘The goose hangs high’ bodes well have a difficult time conceiving of a negative reading, while those who learn that it expresses impending doom cannot easily conceive of a positive reading. In this way, our knowledge of the meaning of the idiom constrain the way we ‘motivate’ the idiom. Instead of reflecting conceptual structures, then, we suggest that intuitions about idiom transparency reflect the mind's interpretive strategies.