Abstract
The present study is a sequel to an investigation published in volume 8 (2008) of this Journal that discussed a group of Arabic idioms that have as at least one of their components a word denoting a weapon and that describe situations or behavior. Here weaponry idioms denoting characteristics and features of people and objects are examined in order to understand their semantic structure and motivation. Since the majority of the idioms studied have been collected from dictionaries, an attempt is made to present an assessment of their current use in Modern Standard Arabic based on Internet sources.
Highlights
The present study is a sequel to an investigation published in volume 8 (2008) of this Journal that discussed a group of Arabic idioms that have as at least one of their components a word denoting a weapon and that describe situations or behavior
Weaponry idioms denoting characteristics and features of people and objects are examined in order to understand their semantic structure and motivation
In this paper I take up a different group of weaponry idioms from those considered in my previous article in this Journal.[2]
Summary
The present study is a sequel to an investigation published in volume 8 (2008) of this Journal that discussed a group of Arabic idioms that have as at least one of their components a word denoting a weapon and that describe situations or behavior. In conformity with Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij and Elisabeth Piirainen’s theory, and using their terminology are ‘iconically motivated’ This type of motivation, according to them, is based on ‘similarity (in a wide sense)’ between the actual phraseological meaning and the literal reading of the expression creating the idiom.[7] Idioms whose motivation is based on image form the largest group of weaponry idioms, but of idioms in general. The motivation can be a combination of both – based on the image created by the literal reading of the expression and on the symbolic meaning of a word These types of motivation of the meaning of idioms, along with other elements of the semantic and syntactic structures, will be taken into consideration here in dealing with Arabic weaponry idioms denoting characteristics of persons and objects. Within these two groups they are arranged according to their syntactic structure
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