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Figurative Language Use
Language is full of figurative expressions like idioms and metaphors, presenting us
with the problem of how to produce and interpret these utterances. Traditionally idioms
have been viewed as lexicalized phrases, without internal structure or meaning. However,
recent research on idiom comprehension has argued that idioms, like literal phrases, may be
decomposable (e.g., Gibbs, Nayak, & Cutting, 1989). For my Masters thesis I examined
how different kinds of meaning and structure influenced the production of idioms
(Cutting & Bock, 1997). I used an error task that elicited idiom blend errors from speakers (e.g.,
"that's the way the cookie bounces"). The results demonstrated that during production, the
internal syntactic structure, the literal meaning of the component words, and the overall
figurative meaning of the idiom are available, arguing against the lexicalized phrase view of
idioms. A surprising result was that idioms that were rated as non-decomposable were as
likely to result in blends as those that were rated as decomposable suggesting that all idioms
are accessed similarly during production. In future research, I would like to further
examine the issue of idiom decomposability during production.
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