UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)
Representing
and processing idioms
ROSA ELENA VEGA-MORENO
This paper focuses on the way in which idioms are mentally
represented and how they are processed in on-line comprehension. The aim is to
develop an account of how hearers understand unfamiliar idioms, familiar idioms
and idiom variants. It will be argued that idiom meanings are represented and
stored holistically in the form of structured phrasal concepts, and that their
comprehension is achieved through just the same processing mechanisms as the
comprehension of non-idiom strings. The account is grounded in two main
assumptions. First, our powerful inferential interpretive abilities enable us
to create and understand concepts ‘on the fly’. Second, the
utterance comprehension process, which often involves such ad hoc concept
construction, is regulated not by an expectation of literalness but by an
expectation of optimal relevance.
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