International Journal of Lexicography Advance Access originally published online on October 31, 2006
International Journal of Lexicography 2006 19(4):379-395; doi:10.1093/ijl/ecl024
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Linguistic Lightbulb Moments: Zeugma in Idioms
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany
(kramer{at}bbaw.de)
The following paper discusses some aspects of zeugmatic constructions involving idioms. Several types of zeugmata are introduced, the structural and semantic properties of controlling, or governing, elements are discussed and the effects of zeugmatic coordination are described.
1 See for example, Koller (1977), Wotjak (1992, 1994), Eickmanns (1995), Sabban (1998, 2004), Elspaß (1998), Dietz (1999), Fellbaum et al. (2004), Pirttisaari (2005). More related literature can be found on the website of the project: ‘Collocations and idioms: An International Bibliography’ [http://kollokationen.bbaw.de/bib/index_de.html].
2 At the end of April 2006, the databank included 773 entries. The total number of relevant corpus examples was 74,159, of which 31,130 have been annotated. Nearly 80% of the annotations refer to morpho-syntactically marked usages of the idioms, e.g., examples of operations like focussing, anaphorization, gapping, pronominalization, etc. For specific examples see Fellbaum et al. (2006), Fellbaum and Stathi (2006), Kramer et al. (2005). In addition, the databank shows examples of the ‘typical’ use of each idiom, as well as the earliest and the latest example in the corpus. Other noteworthy information about examples, such as diachronic properties, is also indicated.
3 For this reason, we performed a systematic analysis of the databank entries. Altogether, 541 examples of zeugma covering 253 idioms were found. The examples cited in this paper are representative.
4 Herein lies the essential difference between zeugma and contamination. The latter merges idioms in such as way that their constituents are no longer identifiable and the reconstruction of the idioms requires decoding. An examples is ‘Irgendwann hat man die Hutschnur voll’, sagte Rudolf S. gestern vor Gericht. (die tageszeitung 23.09.1993, S. 20). (‘At some point you have the hatband full’, Rudolf S. said in court yesterday.) Here the two idioms über die Hutschnur gehen (lit. ‘go beyond the hatband’, i.e. go too far) und die Nase voll haben (lit. ‘have the nose full’, i.e. be fed up) were merged into die Hutschnur voll haben.
5 This fundamental difference between IZ and TZ is the reason that TZs are often considered unacceptable and ungrammatical (Fleischer 1997) or violations of the norm (Elspaß 1998), whereas IZ are accepted as playful and creative uses of language.