caeruleancentaur wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Herman Miller <hmiller@I...> wrote:
>
>
>>(There we go with one of those weird English idioms again, I
>>mean "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?
The idiom is "I'm not clear", which actually means "it's not clear to
me". ("I'm not clear how it would work out in practice").
> 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."
Sounds like a fair description of "I'm not clear" (in this usage). The
syntax is definitely unusual. Not the best example of an idiom, by this
particular definition, but I don't know what else it would be called.