'Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM Press)'
Abstract
The paper briefly surveys contemporary studies in the field of secondary nomination and idiom comprehension
in discourse. The research mainly focuses on the inferential processes which occur at the moment of perceiving
a discourse containing an idiom. Although the inference phenomenon has received much attention in recent
years, the majority of scientific works on the topic are targeted at the inferential processes in text
comprehension while such a challenging area as inference in secondary nomination remains unrevealed. The
aim of the present study is to find out if the traces of inferences in the metaphoric meaning of an idiom can
interfere in the comprehension of a discourse complicated by an idiom. Thus, the study presents an analysis of
idiom comprehension in a narrative discourse that lies in both fields of inference study: inference in secondary
nomination and inference in discourse comprehension. For this purpose, the paper gives an outline to the
theories which explain some mechanisms of inference action and presents an analysis of some pieces of
narrative discourse from the perspectives of the discussed theories. The research is conducted on Russian and
English language material. The results of the study point to the double mapping of the inferential processes that
is caused, on the one hand, by the inferential traces of secondary nomination and, on the other hand, by the
implicit sense of an idiom in discourse. The paper presents a model of conceptual integration in the process of
double inference while comprehending a text complicated by an idiom