Some Aspects Regarding the Grammaticality and Ungrammaticality of Idioms
Some Aspects Regarding the Grammaticality and Ungrammaticality of Idioms

Summary/Abstract: Language, as a system of communication, has literal and figurative meanings. Pure literal language is very rare. Most language use is to some degree figurative. One cannot determine the meaning of some word group or sentence structure just by understanding the meanings of all their component parts and the rules for putting them together. And vice versa, one cannot just take all the words and rules in a language, apply them and get meaningful sentences. The fact that speakers have intuitions about which strings of words are possible and which are not shows that we have an unconscious knowledge of the word groups in a sentence. Studying this unconscious knowledge allows us to construct a model that attempts to explain why we naturally produce grammatical word structures but not ungrammatical ones. The figurative meaning characterizes notions like metaphors, similes, proverbs or idioms. The present paper aims at focusing on idioms, more precisely on some aspects regarding various grammatical and ungrammatical features implied in the structure of idioms.

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