Cutting the mustard: an experimental investigation of idiomatic expressions in the lexicon

2011-11-15Much of the work in theoretical and experimental linguistics has focused upon compositional language, viewing non-compositional expressions such as idioms (e.g. kick the bucket) as exceptional cases in the language system. Early research into these expressions treated them as unanalyzed words-with-spaces (Bobrow & Bell, 1973; Swinney & Cutler, 1979), while more recent work places more emphasis upon their structural properties (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Cutting & Bock, 1997; Sprenger, Levelt & Kempen, 2006). However there is still disagreement regarding the representation of idiomatic expressions in the lexicon, and the role of literal processing in the processing of idioms. This dissertation examines three primary questions (i) how are idioms represented structurally, (ii) how are idioms stored in the lexicon, and related to other elements in lexical space, and (iii) how do individuals process expressions ambiguous between an idiomatic and literal sense. We report the results of three distinct experimental investigations designed to address these questions. The results of our experiments suggest that idiomatic expressions are represented as structural frames in the lexicon and are sensitive to syntactic context during on-line processing (Exp 3a, 3b) and that idiomatic expressions, such as kick the bucket, are lexically related to their literal components kick and bucket such that access to the idiomatic representation is mediated by activation of its literal pieces (Exp, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b). Additionally, we present evidence that some degree of literal processing of idiomatic expressions is obligatory (Exp 1, 2, 4a, 4b) even in semantic contexts that strongly disfavor the literal interpretation of these strings. We present our results as they apply to models of idiom representation and processing