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An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind (Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), leader of the Indian independence movement) An Englishman's home is his castle/A man's home is his castle; Another day, another dollar; Another happy landing; An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; Any port in a storm
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).
[4] However, even examples like "Cow-it" and "I-I-I" remain controversial. There is ambiguity in defining and identifying idioms in American Sign Language as little is known of ASL's use of idioms. Cokely & Baker-Shenk write, "ASL seems to have very few widely-used idioms, according to the standard definition of 'idiom.'" [5]
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, idiomatic phrase, multiword expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, [1] [2] [3] [citation needed] is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained [clarification needed] or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. [4]
See English language idioms derived from baseball and baseball metaphors for sex. Examination of the ethnocultural relevance of these idioms in English speech in areas such as news and political discourse (and how "Rituals, traditions, customs are very closely connected with language and form part and parcel of the linguacultural 'realia'") occurs.
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [39] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
Many fixed idioms lack semantic composition, meaning that the idiom contains the semantic role of a verb, but not of any object. This is true of kick the bucket , which means die . By contrast, the semantically composite idiom spill the beans , meaning reveal a secret , contains both a semantic verb and object, reveal and secret .
Wh-questions can be formed in a variety of ways in ASL. The wh-word can appear solely at the end of the sentence, solely at the beginning of the sentence, at both the beginning and end of the sentence (see section 4.4.2.1 on 'double-occurring wh-words', or in situ (i.e. where the wh-word is in the sentence structure before movement occurs)). [58]