English idioms in the first language and second language lexicon: a ...

Beate Abel 343tional idioms require an idiom entry; decomposable idioms, whichhave compositional aspects, can be represented via constituententries and can additionally develop an idiom entry.As the native and nonnative judgements have shown, themeaning of nondecomposable idioms cannot be determined via themeaning of the individual constituents. This means that nondecomposableidioms are noncompositional and therefore need a separatelexical entry to specify their idiomatic meaning. However,decomposable idioms, which have compositional aspects, can berepresented via their constituent entries. 6 So far this assumption isin agreement with the Configuration Model (Cacciari and Tabossi,1988; Tabossi and Cacciari, 1988) and the Hybrid Model (Titoneand Connine, 1999). However, the DIR Model additionallyproposes that in the case of decomposable idioms, idiom entries aresupplementary information which is not absolutely necessary forsuccessful comprehension, provided conceptual representations areactivated (compare third assumption). The fact that Tabossi andZardon (1993; 1995) and Titone and Connine (1999) showed thatconstituent entries are activated during processing although idiomentries also exist does not contradict the claim made above. Parallelactivation might be due to a close connection between the twoentries in the mental lexicon. Future research on the architectureof the lexicon will help to clarify this point.Independent evidence supporting the first assumption comesfrom the results of empirical studies carried out in the area ofmorphology. With regard to idioms, compounds are of specialinterest, because they are to be located somewhere on the continuumbetween words and (idiomatic) phrases. Compounds are,like idioms, to a greater or lesser degree (non)compositional, i.e.,there are compounds with compositional aspects. These could bereferred to as decomposable, although in morphological terminologythey are usually called transparent. Others are non-6As one anonymous reviewer pointed out, decomposing could be considered a kind ofspecialized inferencing behaviour in comprehension (Haastrup, 1991). If there is no idiomentry, the speaker has to make use of other information available, in this case the meaningof the constituents. In a very general sense, this might be true. On the other hand, however,native and nonnative speakers are able to tell the difference between decomposable andnondecomposable idioms even if they have idiom entries at their disposal. Furthermore,decomposing is an analysis that extends processes of (lexical) inference. It is a ‘strategy’ thatuses lexical and conceptual information.Downloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009