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When highly familiar idioms encountered, their idiomatic meanings can be directly activated. In addition, idioms can behave compositionally if they are decomposable. Decomposability of an idiom refers to the extent to which the literal meaning of the individual words in the word string participate in the overall figurative meaning of the idiom.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
Love is blind—an idiom meaning a person who is in love can see no faults or imperfections in the person whom they love [4] In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality. That compositionality is the key notion for the analysis of idioms emphasized in most accounts of idioms.
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently.
This is a list of idioms that were recognizable to literate people in the late-19th century, and have become unfamiliar since. As the article list of idioms in the English language notes, a list of idioms can be useful, since the meaning of an idiom cannot be deduced by knowing the meaning of its constituent words. See that article for a fuller ...
The count sense of the word idiom, referring to a saying with a figurative meaning, is related to the present sense of the word by the arbitrariness and peculiarity aspects; the idiom "she is pulling my leg" (meaning "she is humorously misleading me") is idiomatic because it belongs, by convention, to the language, whether or not anyone can ...
If known, their origins are noted. A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression , while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context.
A group of words whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words: “She let the cat out of the bag” or “He was caught red-handed.” Inductive teaching Also known as induction, from the verb “to induce”; a facilitative, student-centred teaching technique where the students discover language rules through extensive ...