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

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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
336 English idioms in the L1 and L2 lexiconhand, they were directly compared to the native judgements (for adetailed discussion of theoretical and methodological aspects ofnonnative judgements, see Chaudron, 1983; Sorace, 1990; 1996). Thefindings were used to support the DIR Model, which is suitable forboth the L1 and the L2 lexicon.2 Nonnative speakersFirst, it should be noted that for nonnatives there is no such idiomresearch tradition comparable to the L1 psycholinguistic studiesdiscussed above (but see Irujo, 1986a; 1993). Most studies deal withidioms and the problems they cause for the foreign language learner,resulting in suggestions on how to teach them better (e.g., Irujo,1986b; Otier, 1986; Lattey, 1994; McCaskey, 1994; Duquette, 1995;Richards, 1996; Lennon, 1998; for details, see Abel, 2003). Therefore,the following has the character of a pilot study in that it tries toconsider insights gained from L1 research in order to provide atheoretical framework for future empirical studies on idioms and L2.In two separate studies, nonnative judgements on the decomposabilityof English idioms were conducted. Study 1 dealtexclusively with verbal idioms (V + DET + N, e.g., miss the boat,steal the show, shoot the breeze), while Study 2 used idioms withvarious syntactic forms (e.g., back to square one, a piece of cake).Study 1 restricted itself to verbal idioms in order to control for thesyntactic structure of the data and to keep the sorting task simplebecause of the nonnative sample. Study 2 was designed to yield anidentical dataset to that reported on by Titone and Connine (1994)for a direct comparison between natives and nonnatives. Althoughthe focus of the present study was on the decomposability sortingtask, participants also rated the familiarity of idioms and the easeof the decomposability decision. Familiarity refers to the knowledgeof meaning a participant has about an idiom. Ease of decision waschecked in order to control for the difficulties nonnatives mighthave in rating idioms. The participants who rated decomposabilitywere also asked to indicate how difficult or easy they found thedecision about each idiom’s decomposability on a 5-point scale. Theresults did not show relevant differences between the nonnativeparticipants and a native control group, which indicated thatnonnatives have no difficulties with judgement tasks of this type.Therefore, this factor is not considered here any further (for details,see Abel, 2003).a Participants: A total of 169 graduate and undergraduatestudents at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, participated inDownloaded from http://slr.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on March 7, 2009
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