What do idioms really mean?

Abstract

The “dead” metaphor view of idiomaticity suggests that idioms were once metaphoric but have lost their metaphoricity over time and now are equivalent to simple literal phrases such that blow your stack = “to get very angry,” crack the whip = “to exert authority,” and spill the beans = “to reveal a secret.” The purpose of the present studies was to demonstrate that idioms are not dead metaphors but have more complex meanings that are motivated by conceptual metaphors linking idiom phrases with their figurative interpretations. Six experiments are reported that examine the difference between idioms and their literal paraphrases. A first study examined people's intuitions about different knowledge domains to illustrate that the meanings of idioms are consistent with the source-to-target domain mappings of the conceptual metaphors that motivate these phrases' figurative meanings. The data from Experiments 2 and 3 indicate that people view idioms as having more complex meanings than do their roughly, equivalent literal paraphrases. Experiments 4 through 6 show that idioms are most appropriate to use and easiest to comprehend when they are encountered in discourse situations that are consistent with the entailments of the conceptual metaphors that motivate these phrases' idiomatic meanings. The findings from these studies suggest that idioms are not dead metaphors with simple figurative interpretations. Instead, idioms have complex meanings that are motivated by independently existing conceptual metaphors that are partly constitutive of everyday thought.