Nukus state pedagogical institute foreign language faculty english language and literature department

Chapter I

General information about English Idioms

1.1 Definition of Idioms

The terms idiom and cliché are often used interchangeably, especially when people talk about things you shouldn’t say. But they’re not quite the same thing. A cliché is an expression like “throw the baby out with the bathwater” or “the cat who ate the canary”- a phrase that has been repeated so often that it’s no longer effective. Clichés are like idioms in that you can’t understand the meaning of the phrase by looking at the literal meaning of each word. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater has nothing to do with babies or bathwater; it means that you’re in such a hurry to get rid of something that you accidentally throw out something valuable, too. Someone who looks like a cat who ate the canary doesn’t look like a feline. She looks like someone who is proud of getting away with mischief.

But not all idioms are clichés in the same way that “throw the baby out with the bathwater” is. Consider the phrase “all of a sudden.” You probably know that this phrase means “suddenly.” But it’s hard to see why. We don’t normally use sudden as a noun, as it seems to be in this phrase. And why all? Can you have part of a sudden? Some idioms that seem nonsensical now actually did make logical sense in the past (sudden was a noun, once, but that usage died out everywhere except in this phrase).

English prepositional idioms are numerous and often arbitrary. They are enormously challenging for English language learners, and for that matter, they give native English speakers plenty of trouble, too. In Standard English, you can comply with a rule or conform to a rule, but you can’t comply to a rule. There’s no obvious reason why these particular words require these particular prepositions. The best way to learn which prepositions are construed with which words is by osmosis. In other words, reading a lot and eventually you will internalize the most common prepositional idioms.

In different dictionaries there could be found quite a lot different explaining what an idiom is. There are some of the definitions:

An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements or from the general grammatical rules of a language and that is not a constituent of a larger expression of like characteristics [11; 6].

Idiom – an expression with a meaning that cannot be guessed from the meanings of the individual words [11; 1].

An idiom typical of the natural way in which someone speaks or writes when they are using their own language [11; 4].

Idiom – a group of words that has a special meaning that is different from the ordinary meaning of each separate word.

Idiom – a form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., peculiar to a person or language; a phrase which is understood by speakers of a particular language despite its meaning’s not being predictable from that of the separate words.

According to J. Saeed [38; 60] idioms are “words collocated together happen to become fossilized, becoming fixed over time”. This is the reason why idioms are set out as non-compositional.

Words that tend to be used together by native speakers are called collocations. In English, it’s common to describe a backup of cars on the highway as “heavy traffic”. It’s not common to describe it as “crowded traffic”. Although the phrases could reasonably be interpreted the same way, the collocation “heavy traffic” simply “sounds right” to English speakers.