Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

* caeruleancentaur said on 2005-11-17 13:34:29 +0100
> * Herman Miller <hmiller@I...> wrote:
> > "it's not clear to me"
>
> I'm beginning to think that any definition of "idiom" is in the mind
> of the beholder.  Why is the above cited example an idiom?
>
> David Crystal in "a Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics" defines
> as idiom as "...a sequence of words which is semantically and often
> syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit."
Following is "idiom" in WordNet, my first choice for a dictionary these
days:

  idiom
       n 1: a manner of speaking that is natural to native speakers of a
            language [syn: {parlance}]
       2: the usage or vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific
          group of people; "the immigrants spoke an odd dialect of
          English"; "he has a strong German accent" [syn: {dialect},
           {accent}]
       3: the style of a particular artist or school or movement; "an
          imaginative orchestral idiom" [syn: {artistic style}]
       4: an expression whose meanings cannot be inferred from the
          meanings of the words that make it up [syn: {idiomatic
          expression}, {phrasal idiom}, {set phrase}, {phrase}]

The definition of "idiom" used in computational linguistics is *only*
number 4, so "raining cats and dogs" is an idiom (will need its own
expression-entry in a dictionary, while "(not) clear to <pronoun>" is
not an idiom.


t.