The filling in the sandwich : internal modification of idioms

Idiomatic expressions—defined as (relatively) fixed and semantically opaque units such as 'a one-horse town' or 'buy the farm' (= ‘die’)—are basically self-contained, but can be “anchored” in the discourse at hand via e.g. post-modification: "A great many people thought that the pendulum of permissiveness had swung too far." But internal expansion is also possible: "These dangers are being swept under the risk-factor rug." Using the BNC and newspaper CDs as corpora of sufficient size (approximately 300 million words in all), the patterns and frequency of such anchoring internal expansions in contemporary English are investigated, and compared with those for alternative formulations and the simplex form. Anchoring internal expansion is found to be generally possible, and occasionally inventive, but usually infrequent (with exceptions such as 'not have a leg to stand on'); anchoring the idiom via exemplification in a following clause is a primary discourse alternative.</p

SEED : Sweden’s English Educational Database for tertiary education: Creating a platform for sharing and collaboration

In this report we describe an attempt to build up an inter-university network among active teachers and students throughout Sweden, its failures and successes, and the general lessons that can be learnt from the experience.NSHU project: Sweden's English Educational Database (SEED) for tertiary education 11/14/2008 by Philip Shaw, Mats Deutschman, Rebecca Hincks, Jean Hudson, David Minugh, Åse Nygren. Article to be submitted to ASLAs Årsbok 2008, based on a presentation at the ALA conference 7-8 November 200

Is <em>Time</em> A’Changin’? [Elektronisk resurs] : A diachronic investigation of the idioms used in <em>Time</em>

A newly-available net-based corpus of 105 million words of written American English (Time Magazine, 1923–2006, at http://corpus.byu.edu/time) was investigated for the occurrence and diachronic distribution of various types of ‘pure’ idioms such as be raining cats and dogs. Idioms from the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms (2002 (1995)) were selected for four types of variation and change. Group 1, the 46 idioms labeled ‘old-fashioned’, proved to be noticeably more common before 1970. Group 2, several constructions of the type as scarce as X, exhibited considerably more variation than in more diversified corpora such as the British National Corpus. Group 3, Biblically-derived idioms, were generally less common after 1960, but with the lowest frequencies in the 1930s. The frequencies for the final group, 32 idioms focusing on deception, were relatively constant from the 1950s on, with an interesting dip in the 1970s. Changes in editorial policies may possibly have influenced these results. While not of sufficient magnitude for detailed studies of individual items over time, the Time corpus clearly is sufficient to provide us with a great deal of data and numerous valuable insights into the use of these idioms.</p

The College Idiom : Idioms in the COLL Corpus

As with much of vocabulary, idioms in the stricter sense appear to be acquired continually throughout one’s lifetime. Since most of the material in current large-scale corpora comes from writers well out of their teens, the 3.7 M word COLL corpus of college student online newspapers from Australia, the British Isles, New Zealand, North America and South Africa (Minugh 2002) provides one of the few already-compiled sources of writing by 20-year-olds, and thus is an interesting starting point for an investigation of which idioms are in use in the writing of university students in the English-speaking world when they address their peers. Using the idioms specified in the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms as our starting point, the COLL corpus will be examined for use of idioms. Specific questions to investigate include which idioms occur, their geographic and subgenre distribution, their positions in the texts and their textual functions. Idiom-breaking, i.e. playful variation, may also be expected to occur in this particular genre, and the corpus can provide an indication of how prevalent this is, as well.</p

The Coll Corpus : Towards a corpus of web-based college student newspapers

Unlike major English-language corpora hitherto released, on-line college student newspapers provide an unexplored record from much younger writers. In these newspapers, 20-year-olds address their peers in a situation that largely parallels standard newspaper writing as regards formal correctness and time pressure. Nearly unconstrained by outside intervention or house style sheets, they deal with a range of university student interests, including creative writing.This preliminary version of the Coll Corpus consists of one issue each of nearly all 300-plus college and university newspapers available on the Web as of spring 1999, with a total of 3.88 million words. Although AmE dominates, the resultant geographical distribution is relatively well matched to actual population ratios. In its present form, the corpus already allows exploration of numerous lexical and semantic features along temporal and geographic dimensions. Given its on-line accessibility, future versions should be easily expandable by several orders of magnitude.</p

Studies in Corpora and Idioms : Getting the cat out of the bag

“Idiomatic” expressions, usually called “idioms”, such as a dime a dozen, a busman’s holiday, or to have bats in your belfry are a curious part of any language: they usually have a fixed lexical (why a busman?) and structural composition (only dime and dozen in direct conjunction mean ‘common, ordinary’), can be semantically obscure (why bats?), yet are widely recognized in the speech community, in spite of being so rare that only large corpora can provide us with access to sufficient empirical data on their use. In this compilation thesis, four published studies focusing on idioms in corpora are presented. Study 1 details the creation of and data in the author’s medium-sized corpus from 1999, the 3.7 million word Coll corpus of online university student newspapers, with comparisons to data from standard corpora of the time. Study 2 examines the extent to which recognized idioms are to be found in the Coll corpus and how they can be varied. Study 3 draws upon the British National Corpus and a series of British and American newspaper corpora to see how idioms may be “anchored” in their contexts, primarily by the device of premodification via an adjective appropriate to the context, not to the idiom. Study 4 examines idiom-usage patterns in the Time Magazine corpus, focusing on possible aspects of diachronic change over the near-century Time represents. The introductory compilation chapter places and discusses these studies in their contexts of contemporary idiom and corpus research; building on these studies, it provides two specific examples of potential ways forward in idiom research: an examination of the idioms used in a specific subgenre of newspapers (editorials), and a detailed suggestion for teachers about how to examine multiple facets of a specific modern idiom (the glass ceiling) in the classroom. Finally, a summing-up includes suggestions for further research, particularly at the level of the patterning of individual idioms, rather than treating them as a homogeneous phenomenon