General characteristics and origins of English idioms with a proper name constituent : a study based on their etymology as available in the typical compilation
REIJONEN, HEIKKI (2006)
REIJONEN, HEIKKI
2006
Englantilainen filologia - English Philology
Humanistinen tiedekunta - Faculty of Humanities
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2006-02-22
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uta-1-15403
https://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uta-1-15403
Tiivistelmä
The data consists of the one hundred English idioms with a proper name constituent, occurring most frequently in the ten final sources
containing the most PN idioms among the twenty original works, whose 500 idioms are also used for numerical comparisons.
The aim of this thesis is to chart the terrain of modern English
proper name idioms, i.e. to find their general features: where they
derive from, in what forms and structures they normally appear, how they are located in British and American geography, and what type of sphere of activity and attitudinal tone they represent. This study also seeks to find out what information is given in the data on each person or locality that has lent its name to the idiom. To this end, three aspects for each idiom were checked in the idiom compilations (the sources), and the Oxford English Dictionary (the reference work): definition, etymology, and the first quotations of actual use.
By information value, the sources studied fell into three categories: 1) those seldom extending beyond the definition (OxfId, ChambId, LongId), 2) those adding to the definition some sort of derivation (R&S, CollId, Noble), and 3) those defining, deriving, and usually also ’backlighting’ the idiom from various perspectives (Brewer, M&M, Hunt, and Funk).
In summary, the typical source is likely to enhance the general
reader’s conception of some of individual idioms, but is equally likely,
on the whole, to leave the inquisitive (etymologically-minded) student
rather dissatisfied: the mean grade scored by the ten sources was 2.04 out of the maximum of 3. The mean value of the best presentations for each idiom, however, amounted to 2.66 as against the 2.47 attained by the OED, implying that an idiom dictionary of sound overall quality will at best be equal, even superior, to the OED in terms of information value.
Findings on the Oxford English Dictionary showed that, inevitably,
it has its imperfections even failures proving its vulnerability.
Yet, in contrast with these inadequacies, it was found on several
occasions to excel any of the ten sources in its accurate, factual, and
reliable information.
This thesis also showed that the ‘birth-date’ of a proper name idiom
is seldom fixable to an accurate year, let alone month or day. Instead,
it typically requires several years to gain popularity, and often a
decade or more to become established. This aspect is perhaps partly due to an idiom’s frequent birth as a word of mouth, put forth to meet a given discoursal challenge; it is often a great deal later that the idiom finds its way into literary use; hence, it is usually difficult to
pinpoint an idiom back to a certain date.
In addition, certain structural patterns emerged from the studied
proper name idioms, outstanding certain others: person name idioms over place name idioms, idioms with a British names over those with non-British ones, idioms with first names over those with other name classes, noun phrase idioms over idioms with other phrase types, male name idioms over female name ones, negative idioms over neutral ones, and neutral idioms over positive ones, whether male of female.
These patterns in the data would deserve a systematic study on a
large corpus, with a view to establishing the extent the present findings would coincide with the new observations. It would be of equal interest to find to what extent the structural typology developed for this thesis (the matrix) would conform to that yielded by such a massive corpus. All these interesting issues remain, however, to be investigated by future research.
Hakutermit: idioms
containing the most PN idioms among the twenty original works, whose 500 idioms are also used for numerical comparisons.
The aim of this thesis is to chart the terrain of modern English
proper name idioms, i.e. to find their general features: where they
derive from, in what forms and structures they normally appear, how they are located in British and American geography, and what type of sphere of activity and attitudinal tone they represent. This study also seeks to find out what information is given in the data on each person or locality that has lent its name to the idiom. To this end, three aspects for each idiom were checked in the idiom compilations (the sources), and the Oxford English Dictionary (the reference work): definition, etymology, and the first quotations of actual use.
By information value, the sources studied fell into three categories: 1) those seldom extending beyond the definition (OxfId, ChambId, LongId), 2) those adding to the definition some sort of derivation (R&S, CollId, Noble), and 3) those defining, deriving, and usually also ’backlighting’ the idiom from various perspectives (Brewer, M&M, Hunt, and Funk).
In summary, the typical source is likely to enhance the general
reader’s conception of some of individual idioms, but is equally likely,
on the whole, to leave the inquisitive (etymologically-minded) student
rather dissatisfied: the mean grade scored by the ten sources was 2.04 out of the maximum of 3. The mean value of the best presentations for each idiom, however, amounted to 2.66 as against the 2.47 attained by the OED, implying that an idiom dictionary of sound overall quality will at best be equal, even superior, to the OED in terms of information value.
Findings on the Oxford English Dictionary showed that, inevitably,
it has its imperfections even failures proving its vulnerability.
Yet, in contrast with these inadequacies, it was found on several
occasions to excel any of the ten sources in its accurate, factual, and
reliable information.
This thesis also showed that the ‘birth-date’ of a proper name idiom
is seldom fixable to an accurate year, let alone month or day. Instead,
it typically requires several years to gain popularity, and often a
decade or more to become established. This aspect is perhaps partly due to an idiom’s frequent birth as a word of mouth, put forth to meet a given discoursal challenge; it is often a great deal later that the idiom finds its way into literary use; hence, it is usually difficult to
pinpoint an idiom back to a certain date.
In addition, certain structural patterns emerged from the studied
proper name idioms, outstanding certain others: person name idioms over place name idioms, idioms with a British names over those with non-British ones, idioms with first names over those with other name classes, noun phrase idioms over idioms with other phrase types, male name idioms over female name ones, negative idioms over neutral ones, and neutral idioms over positive ones, whether male of female.
These patterns in the data would deserve a systematic study on a
large corpus, with a view to establishing the extent the present findings would coincide with the new observations. It would be of equal interest to find to what extent the structural typology developed for this thesis (the matrix) would conform to that yielded by such a massive corpus. All these interesting issues remain, however, to be investigated by future research.
Hakutermit: idioms