International Journal of Lexicography Advance Access originally published online on October 28, 2006
International Journal of Lexicography 2006 19(4):361-377; doi:10.1093/ijl/ecl023
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Polysemy and Vagueness in Idioms: A Corpus-based Analysis of Meaning
Universität Potsdam (chuemmer{at}web.de)
Berlin – Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Freie Universität Berlin (stathi{at}bbaw.de)
This paper presents a corpus-based approach to the meaning of verb phrase idioms and proposes a set of parameters for the systematic description of their meaning in different contexts. It also discusses polysemy and vagueness in relation to idioms and offers criteria for the operationalisation of this distinction.
1 For every occurrence of an idiom we consider a context of three sentences preceding and three sentences following the sentence containing the target expression.
2 There is one exception: one example where the subject is a group of animals (Blattläuse ‘aphids’), a very marginal use of the idiom.
3 We have to rely heavily on world knowledge in order to distinguish between the two senses in cases where proper names are in subject position.
4 This is probably due to the fact that reference to death has to be clear enough and leave no misunderstandings.
5 Although the semantic class of the arguments of the verb is often also decisive in disambiguating between senses, we treat them as a separate category, since meaning triggers are purely contextual elements which can occur in the wider context and do not usually stand in any syntactic relationship to the idiom.