coalescence - sconli

Chapter 20
Comprehension of Body Part Idioms in Children
Sheerin Hena
sheerinfalak@gmail.com
This paper talks about the comprehension of Hindi-Urdu body part idioms in
children. The children chosen for the study are the native speakers of Hindi-
Urdu. According to the current compositional models of language
comprehension, idioms form the heterogeneous set comprising of both
decomposable and non decomposable linguistic units. Looking into the
empirical data of body part idioms in Hindi- Urdu, it was found that there are
idioms which fall in between these extremities of the classification. Therefore I
felt the need to classify the idioms of Hindi – Urdu into three categories. The
idioms which fall in between these extremities were termed as „partial
decomposable idioms‟. As the name itself suggest these idioms are partly
transparent and did not fit both for the transparent and opaque idioms. An
experiment was conducted to study the idiomatic comprehension of these
categories. The idiomatic comprehension was studied in three groups each age
nine, ten and eleven years. The students were third, fourth and fifth graders. The
comprehension was judged by seeing the percentage of correct responses of each
category of the body part idioms. The result shows that children understood
opaque idioms much better than the transparent idioms. Even the younger
children (age nine and third grader), in the presence of supporting context
comprehended the opaque idiom (non decomposable) better than the other
categories. The results also indicated that the incorrect responses were mostly
literal meaning of the idiomatic phrases regardless of the subject‟s age.
INTRODUCTION
Acquiring conversational competence in language requires an understanding of
the use and meanings of idiomatic expressions. The idioms or idiomatic usage are
ambiguous structures for a child. These structures usually have two distinct semantic
representations, literal and idiomatic. Katz and Postal (1963) defined idioms in the
following manner: “The essential feature of an idiom is that its full meaning, and more
generally the meaning of any sentence containing an idiomatic stretch, is not a
compositional function of the meaning of the idiom‟s elementary grammatical parts”.
Similarly, Fraser (1970.p.22) defined idiom as, “a constituent or series of constituents for
which the semantic interpretation is not a compositional function of the formatives of
which it is composed”. Chafe (1970) states that literal meanings are acquired first in a
language preceding idiomatic meaning acquisition. That is, a child learns “He kicked the
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