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

Beate Abel 335representations – that there is not only a lexical, but also aconceptual level of representation, and secondly that constituentand idiom entries co-exist at the lexical level – was gathered fromnative and nonnative judgements on the decomposability of idioms.III Judgements on the decomposability of idioms1 Native speakersGibbs and his colleagues carried out many studies on idiom decomposability(Gibbs and Nayak, 1989; Gibbs, Nayak and Cutting,1989; Gibbs, Nayak, Bolton and Keppel, 1989).They identified threegroups of idioms: decomposable (e.g., pop the question, break theice, clear the air), abnormally decomposable (e.g., carry a torch, spillthe beans, bury the hatchet) and nondecomposable (e.g., chew thefat, shoot the breeze, pack a punch) ones (Gibbs and Nayak, 1989:133–34). As mentioned above, in decomposable idioms theconstituents contribute to the idiom’s figurative meaning, innondecomposable idioms they do not. Abnormally decomposableidioms are a subgroup of decomposable idioms, ‘whose individualcomponents have some metaphorical relation to their idiomaticreferents’ (Gibbs and Nayak, 1989: 109). The results show thatdecomposable idioms are syntactically more productive, lexicallymore flexible and more quickly processed than nondecomposableones. One point of criticism is that in the studies reported by Gibbsand his colleagues the participants had to judge idioms that werepreselected by the authors on the basis of the three groups ofidioms described above, thus implying a balanced distribution of allEnglish idioms among the three groups. Titone and Connine (1994)had their participants freely comment on 171 idioms and found anasymmetrical division, i.e., they found that native speakers ofEnglish judge 41.9% to be decomposable idioms and 58.1% to benondecomposable. Furthermore, they identified some fundamentalproblems with regard to abnormally decomposable idioms: ‘subjectscannot easily make this distinction for all but a few idiosyncraticphrases. In contrast, the decomposable and nondecomposablesorting task was more reliable’ (Titone and Connine, 1994: 262). Itseems that the subdivision of decomposable idioms into normallyand abnormally decomposable ones is of low psychological validity.The fact that the results obtained by Gibbs et al. differ from thefindings of Titone and Connine led to the two studies describedbelow. In order to support and validate one or the other study, anonnative sample was used. On the one hand, the nonnativejudgements were examined in their own right and, on the otherDownloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009