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

Beate Abel 333compositional, whereas nondecomposable idioms are usually trulynoncompositional (but see Hamblin and Gibbs, 1999). As anexample, consider the decomposable idiom miss the boat. Here, theverbal constituent miss contributes to the figurative meaning in acompositional way: something is missed. In a truly compositional,i.e., literal reading, a boat is missed, whereas in the idiomaticreading, an opportunity is missed. Many nondecomposable idioms,e.g., kick the bucket, have a compositional reading as well. Thecompositional reading denotes their literal meaning, whereas thefigurative meaning is noncompositional. Note that there are somenondecomposable idioms that have no compositional reading at all,e.g., shoot the breeze. In generative work on idioms, kick the buckethas been used as the standard example. This particular idiom isindeed noncompositional and nondecomposable, but it proved tobe a mistake to overgeneralize noncompositionality and apply it tothe whole group of idioms and assume that per se all idioms arenoncompositional in nature. As many psycholinguistic studies onidioms have shown, the presupposition of noncompositionality doesnot hold for all idioms (see, for example, Gibbs and Nayak, 1989;Gibbs, Nayak and Cutting, 1989; Gibbs, Nayak, Bolton and Keppel,1989; Titone and Connine, 1994).A fifth processing hypothesis, the Hybrid Model of IdiomComprehension (Titone and Connine, 1999), used insights gainedfrom the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis, although they did notstrictly differentiate between decomposability and compositionality.The authors focus on one of the central questions mentioned above,namely on ‘determining the degree to which idiomatic and literalmeanings are initially computed during idiom processing’ (Titoneand Connine, 1999: 1668). With a relatively small sample of 24participants and 32 idioms they conducted an eye-tracking study.The results support their hypothesis that automatically bothmeanings – the literal and the figurative – are activated. Fornondecomposable (in their terminology noncompositional) idiomsit takes longer to integrate the correct meaning into the idiomaticcontext, because in this case the two meanings are semanticallydistinct. The Hybrid Model is superior to the other processinghypotheses because it controls for the decomposability of idioms.It allows – as the Configuration Model (Cacciari and Tabossi, 1988;Tabossi and Cacciari, 1988) does – for both the literal and thefigurative meaning to be activated during idiom processing.In general, the present study agrees with the fundamentalassumptions and findings of both the Configuration Model and theHybrid Model. However, the five comprehension hypothesesdiscussed above suffer from certain shortcomings. The three studiesDownloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009